By Teddy Nwanunobi
Abuja (Sundiata Post) — Arrangements have been concluded by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) to restructuring, transformation, reformation and other preparations for the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), as the Board is now set to commence the sale of its application document in March, 2017.
Consequently, the Board has warned candidates not to patronise cyber cafés by registering for the 2017 UTME through any them, adding that it would not deploy the use of scratch cards for the 2017 UTME registration exercise.
The Board, through an emailed statement signed by its Head of Information, Fabian Benjamin, on Tuesday, hinted that candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select NCE (college) or ND (polytechnic/monotechnic) as their first choice up to third choice and the fourth IEI.
“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 (IEIs) or polytechnic/monotechnic.
“However, if a candidate makes a public university his first choice, he will not have any public university to choose for second, third and fourth choice. He will have on the remaining three choices, a college, a polytechnic, private university and IEIs.
“However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select NCE (college) or ND (polytechnic/monotechnic) as their first choice up to third choice and the fourth IEI.
“They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their first choice up to the fourth 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 fingers are 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 patronise any cyber café 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,” the statement read.
