The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), has said that the act establishing the Board forbids it from unilaterally assigning candidates to tertiary institutions as it is not only illegal to do so but it is tantamount to usurping the rights of the candidates to choose which institution and programme they want to enrol in.
This was made known by the Registrar of JAMB, Prof Ishaq Oloyede during a visit by some proprietors of Innovative Enterprise Institutes (IEIs) who requested the Registrar to post candidates to their institutes owing to a dearth of candidates and low subscription to IEIs.
The proprietors, who wrote through the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) to see the Registrar, were at the Headquarters of the Board, Bwari, to hold talks with the Registrar on issues bordering on admission timetable, cutoff marks and making National Innovative Diploma (NID) as qualifications for Direct Entry (DE), among other issues. The Registrar, while responding to their list of demands, reminded them that the decision on the sequence and conduct of the 2019/2020 Admission was resolved at the Policy Meeting with many IEIs in attendance where they opted for a much later period to conduct their admission.
Prof. Oloyede explained that it was possible to conduct all admissions simultaneously with the rich features and functionality of the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) but he reminded the IEIs that they had opted to wait till the other tiers would have completed their admissions before they would commence their own exercise.
The Registrar added that universities and other strata of institutions were given the opportunity to commence their admission process after the release of WAEC /NECO results, hence the commencement of all admissions in August.
On the issue of selling the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) application documents while the IEIs admission was ongoing, the Registrar reminded the delegation that the arrangement was to address their peculiarities. He stated that the practice before he came on board was for the application documents to be sold in November but he stopped that and had moved the sale to January to allow the IEIs and other institutions conclude their admissions.
Prof. Oloyede added that the commencement of the sale of application documents was simply to kick-start the arrangements for the 2020 UTME. He said, to that end, preparatory meetings with examination bodies to harmonise their examination timetables to prevent clashes had been held. He added that the WAEC starts on 6 April 2020, followed by NECO and NABTEB meaning that JAMB must conduct its UTME before 6 April, 2020.
