JAMB Introduces 6 New Things that will Happen in this Year’s UTME

The Joint Admission Matriculation Board, JAMB, has made some major changes in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations, UTME, for 2017.

In a statement released on Tuesday, February 28, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, head of Information, said candidates awaiting results would not be admitted into any institution and JAMB will start the sale of 2017 UTME application documents in March, Daily Trust reports.

1. Awaiting results

”In the cause of conducting admission exercise, many institutions have admitted candidates on merit only for them to discover that such candidates do not have qualified O’level results or the right combination for admission and had to delete and start the process all over again. With this, they would have denied other qualified candidates the opportunities for admissions.”

2. Fourth Choice

JAMB has also introduced a fourth choice of school option for candidates but would only be able to select only one government school while filling out their forms online.

3. No choosing of public university

The new registration platform will now be first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice and not most preferred, preferred etc as it was.

Candidates’ first choice can be a College, University, Innovative Enterprises Institutions or Polytechnic/Monotechnic. However, if a candidate makes a Public University his first choice, he will not have any public University to choose for 2nd, 3rd and 4th choice.

He will have on the remaining three choices, a College, a Polytechnic, Private University and IEI’S. However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select NCE (College) or ND (Polytechnic/ Monotechnic) as their 1st choice up to 3rd choice and the 4th IEI.

They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their 1st choice up to the 4th choice, but can only pick a public university once.

READ ALSO: JAMB Gives Reason why Candidates Can No Longer Apply to Two Public Universities

4. JAMB form sold late

The organizers of the major examinations in the country, including JAMB met to avoid a clash in schedules and in order to have a harmonized timetable.

An agreement was reached at the national headquarters of the Board in Abuja on Tuesday, January 24, after a meeting with National Examination Council (NECO), West African Examination Council (WAEC) and National Business and Technical Examination (NABTEB) to harmonize the timetable.

This is one reason the registration is yet to begin.

5. Mock UTME

While speaking the body also announced that plans were in place for a mock UTME and this might explain the delay in beginning the sales of the examination forms. So if you are preparing, start your preparations now, so you can do well in both the mock and the real deal.

6. No scratch card

Speaking on the issue of scratch card, the registrar explained that one reason for the delay was due to issues the board had with sale of scratch cards.

He said that whereas candidates used to buy scratch cards to access the forms online previously, they planned to cancel that since it had been abused thoroughly.

”What we want to do is for students to pay directly to government coffers and we are working out the process of doing so to avoid the type of abuse that it has been subjected to.

So, we want to sell directly and to make sure that candidates pay into TSA account. We have cases of students saying their scratch cards got burnt, others saying their scratch cards were swallowed by snakes or lost in an accident.”

Read the original press statement which JAMB released:

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has concluded all restructuring, transformation, reforms and other preparation for the 2017 UTME and is now set to commence the sale of its application document in March, 2017.

We sincerely appreciate the patience exhibited by Nigerians in allowing us take time to add value to the services we have been offering to Nigerians for over three decades.

Because we need a different and progressive result that will position Nigerian educational system in an enviable height in the comity of nations, then we must do things differently. The Board is poised to see that a reasonable percentage of candidates who take this examination and are qualified find placement in tertiary institutions.

In the cause of conducting admission exercise, many institutions have admitted candidates on merit only for them to discover that such candidates do not have qualified O’levels results or the right combination for admission and had to delete and start the process all over again. With this, they would have denied other qualified candidates the opportunities for admissions.

This we are addressing by ensuring that no candidate is henceforth recommended without his O’levels result being supplied. To achieve this, JAMB will insist that candidates supply their result on its website during registration or later, but before admissions commences for them to be considered for admissions. We believe this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admissions.

We have designed a Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) where the Board will interface with the institutions and ensure the compliance of this reform. The summary is that no candidate will be admitted with awaiting result. Candidates and their parents are also to note that the Board has restructured the registration platform to allow for only one choice of Public University. The new registration platform will now be first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice and not most preferred, preferred etc as it was.

Candidates’ first choice can be a College, University, Innovative Enterprises Institutions or Polytechnic/Monotechnic. However, if a candidate makes a Public University his first choice, he will not have any public University to choose for 2nd, 3rd and 4th choice. He will have on the remaining three choices, a College, a Polytechnic, Private University and IEI’S. However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select NCE (College) or ND (Polytechnic/Monotechnic) as their 1st choice up to 3rd choice and the 4th IEI. They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their 1st choice up to the 4th choice, but can only pick a public university once.

This restructuring is to expand the opportunities available to candidates as almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list because they hardly exhaust their first choice.

The registration of UTME this year will go side by side with the Direct Entry and during registration, candidates 10 fingeare to be captured using Biometric Verification Machine (BVN).

Again, we want to inform candidates that no cyber café will be registering candidates for our examination. On no account should any candidate patronize any cybercafé for our registration. It is important to note that the Board will not deploy the use of any scratch card for the 2017 UTME registration exercise.