JAMB Sets Admission Deadline for Universities

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) warned yesterday that universities which are unable to conclude their admission procedures into first degree programmes for the 2010/2011 session by the second week of October would forfeit admission for the session.

The Registrar, Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, who stated this in Abuja yesterday, frowned at the inability of some universities to take advantage of the early release of results by the board and other examination bodies to correct the disconnect in the academic calendars in the university system.

Ojerinde lamented that only 23,000 candidates, excluding those whose admissions were concluded at a recent meeting in Ile-Ife had so far been admitted for the session in question, noting that “the chunk of the exercise has not been done because of the inability of institutions with large carrying capacities to present their recommended candidates for placement.”

Some 527,000 freshmen would be admitted for first degree programmes in the universities at the conclusion of the exercise, meaning that some 340, 000 of the 866, 000 candidates who scaled the 180 national cut-off marks would still not be admitted by the universities.

According to the Registrar, much as some of the institutions which have yet to conclude their admission formalities have notified the board, “it is still against the spirit of consensus that was reached on the timetable for the exercise.”
Warning that the second week of October deadline was sacrosanct, Ojerinde appealed to those institutions which had not made recommendations to the board on their admission to do so since JAMB was resolved to work within the time-frame that was jointly agreed by the institutions and the board. “The board will not have any genuine reason to accept submissions outside the timeline,” he said.

On the fate of the 82,000 candidates who had incomplete results in the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), he said the results of the 2,400 of them who made the national cut-off mark had since been sent to the various institutions of their choices for possible admission.
“This is a departure from the previous practice where candidates with incomplete result, were not considered for admission,” Ojerinde said, adding that the hopes of such candidates lay mainly in the polytechnics and colleges of education.
So far, only 4,635 and 6,843 admissions had been made in the polytechnics and the colleges of education respectively.