The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has clarified that there is nothing like a uniform minimum national Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) score for any tertiary institution tier.
The Board never decided on such a ‘uniform score for any institution, Fabian Benjamin, JAMB’s Head, Public Affairs and Protocol, said.
According to him, the Board “does not and has never determined any uniform national UTME scores otherwise known as cut-off mark by the general public for any tertiary institution because, in actual sense, there are no uniform national UTME scores.
He explained that the Boar conducts the UTME and hands over the results to institutions for the conduct of admissions.
“However, before the admission exercise commences, a policy meeting is held with all the Heads of the Institutions in attendance and chaired by the Hon. Minister of Education,” Benjamin said.
“At this meeting, the admission guidelines, which include recommendations from individual institutions and their preferred minimum admission scores, are presented and deliberated upon at the meeting and not JAMB as erroneously portrayed by Prof. Fagge because JAMB is only a member out of the close to about a thousand participants at the meeting.”
The lucid process of admission, which the former President of the Academic Staff Union of University, Prof. Nasir Fagge, expounded and was published in Premium Times, is the exact process being followed in the conduct of admission exercise to tertiary institutions in the country. This process has even been improved by eliminating human interference through its full automation with the introduction of the Central Admissions Processing System(CAPS).”
“Before the meeting, for instance, more than 50% of the universities had submitted in writing their minimum scores of 200 and above to the Board for presentation to the meeting for the purpose of deliberation. The same applied to the other tiers of tertiary institutions. This process implies that no institution could admit any candidate with scores below what they had submitted as their minimum score.”
“Perhaps, it is also apt to address the series of misconceptions about what is generally described as a “uniform minimum national UTME score” for admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
“For some time now, many candidates and some members of the general public have been under the erroneous impression that there is a minimum national UTME score set by the Board, which they also refer to as the “cut-off point”. The truth is that there is nothing like a national minimum UTME score for all Universities, Polytechnics or Colleges of Education in Nigeria as only individual institutions set their minimum entry scores based on their peculiarities.”