JAMB Rescinds Plan To Redistribute Candidates With Lower Scores

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB has back-off on its new policy adopted on July 14 to redistribute candidates to universities.

JAMB’s Public Relation Officer, Mr. Benjamin Fabian who disclosed this Tuesday in a telephone conversations said: ”Candidates should go and write the post-UTME in their institutions of first choices.”

He, however noted that after the post-UTME in their universities of first choice, if necessary, JAMB is still going to redistribute them.

He said: “When they write the post-UTME in the schools of their first choices, they may wish to consider the other places we have taken them to for admissions.

”The reason is that if they don’t get admission in their first choices institution, they will get in the second.”

He explained that JAMB’s effort in redistributing candidates was only geared towards helping candidates of over-subscribed institutions gain admission to other federal or state universities rather than wasting their scores.

You will recalled that JAMB had last week announced its new policy to redistributes candidates to universities other than their first choice.

The development which generated sharp criticism from stakeholders almost paralysed some of the most sought after universities in the country.

However, Mr. Fabian Benjamin also said that the parents agitation was uncalled for.

According to him, universities are at liberty to go higher than 180 as cut off marks, based on their peculiarities.

He said, however, that whatever cut-off points they were adopting must be uniformly applied to all candidates.

“I do not see anything wrong with what UNILAG has done. This is because a time will come when some universities may have to peg their cut-off points at 300 marks, based on performance.

“Before we send candidates to the universities, we normally ensure that we know their carrying capacities, because we do not want a situation where they will present more than they can admit.

“There are private universities and other tertiary institutions that also need candidates, so, we try to distribute evenly,” he said.