SAN FRANCISCO, September 16, (THEWILL) – The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has insisted that tertiary institutions must have students from every state of the federation, even as it warned institutions in the country against arbitrary and unjust processes in this year’s admission process.
The JAMB Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede stated this Friday at the Extra-Ordinary 2016 Technical Committee Meeting on Admissions into First Choice Institutions held at Baze University in Abuja.
While acknowledging that universities, polytechnics and colleges of educations reserve the right to admit students, he held that they must justly explain why other candidates were not admitted.
According to him, “The institutions have the right to select (their students) but they must be able to explain if someone is not taken.”
“Universities have the right to determine the criteria for admission but the criteria must be reasonable, explicit and must have been published prior to application by the candidates.”
JAMB further bemoaned the admission criteria of some institutions saying they are supposed to be universal and open to all.
It said, “Even when you are not having candidates from other parts of the country or one reason or another, you should be able to be national no matter your proprietorship.
“A situation where you have a federal university with students from only 10 to 15 states of the federation, that shows that the institution is not justifying its existence. We are insisting that every institution must have students from every state of the federation in order to bring national cohesion, unity and students who will be global products.”
Describing itself as a referee for justice, equity and standards, JAMB assured that it will not initiate or insert any candidate(s) but will ensure that no candidate is unjustly treated by any institution.
According to Oloyede, the “only difference between this year’s admissions process and what has always been the practice, is the policy that there should be no written post UTME test. All other processes remain.”
He noted that in their first technical meeting, some institutions were brazenly arbitrary in their criteria for admission, and said that as a referee, JAMB will resist such arbitrariness and illegal introduction of extraneous factors which were not contained in the published advertisement made available to the candidates.
“A situation where requirements that were not stated in the brochure to guide candidates suddenly become applicable during admissions exercise would be unacceptable. This is because a condition not stated in the rules cannot be effected to the detriment of law abiding applicants who applied in accordance with the institutional provisions in the brochure,” he said.
The JAMB Registrar stated that the approved admissions deadline of November 30, 2016 still stands and that institutions should be able to explain to every Nigerian child who had applied for admissions why he/she was not admitted into his/her institution of choice.
“Let me also advise institutions that were yet to update their requirements for the 2017 brochure to urgently do so. Whatever waivers that might be applicable in institutions should be clearly defined in the brochure,” he warned.
On the measures being taken to sanitize the admission process, he said that sanitation is a very strong word, adding that “we will smoothen where things are not done properly by any of the stakeholders in such a way that we will not only be doing what is right but we will be seen by reasonable people to have done what is right.”
“What I believe is that JAMB is there for equity, standard and justice and we are going to work together with our colleagues in the institutions and I have no doubt that the right thing will be done,” Oloyede said.
