By Iliya Kure
Kaduna (Nigeria) — Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Nigeria’s tertiary institution entry exams body, has released new guidelines for the 2016 admissions into tertiary institutions in the country.
According to the new guidelines, a point based system would now be used to offer provisional admission to candidates; universities would then go ahead to screen their candidates for a fee – this process is to replace the current post UTME.
The new system which is point based system was adopted after a one-week long meeting the Board had with administrators of the tertiary institutions.
“The JAMB admission checker portal is going to be opened soon for this process, so praying is all you can do now,” JAMB says on its website.
The statement further says, “JAMB’s provisional admission no longer makes much sense this year, your points tally will decide your faith. The points are evenly spread out between your O’ Level and JAMB results to provide a level-playing field for all.
“In the first case, any candidate who submits only one result which contains his/her relevant subjects already has 10 points. The exam could be NECO, WASSCE, November/December WASSCE etc, but any candidate who has two sittings only gets 2 points. So this means that candidates with only one result are at an advantage but only just.”
“Next point grades fell into the O’ Level grades where each grade would have it equivalent point; A=6 marks, B=4 marks, C=3 marks, so the better the candidates’ grades, the better his or her chances of securing admission this year.
“The next point is the UTME scores where each score range has its equivalent point which can be summarised thus, 180-200=20-23 marks, 200-250=24-33 points, 251-300=34-43, 300-400=44-60 points,” the statement says.
This is to say, a candidate with 180-185 gets 20 points, while a candidate with 186-190 gets 21 points.
“Merit contains 45 per cent of the total candidates for a particular course, Catchment contains 35 per cent and ELDS and staff lists contains the rest. Cut off marks will be released by the institutions this year in the form of points and not marks.
“If a school declares its cut off mark for Medicine as 90 points and JAMB grants a candidate with 250 a provisional admission but his/her total points falls short of the 90 points, then he/she will lose the admission. So the provisional admission is just a means to an end, not the end in itself.” The statement added.
The point system guideline for direct entry is not yet released.
