The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says there is no uniform minimum Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) scores for any of the tiers of tertiary institutions, explaining that it is not its duty to decide the requirements for any institution.
The board made this known in Abuja on Monday while clarifying reports that it is the duty of JAMB to set minimum scores for admission. The board stressed that it has never determined any uniform national UTME scores otherwise known as cut-off marks by the general public for any tertiary institution or determined criteria for admission.
According to the board, the process of admission which the former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Nasir Fagge, expounded is the exact process being followed in the conduct of admission exercise to tertiary institutions in the country.
“The board does not and has never determined any uniform national UTME scores otherwise known as a cut-off mark by the general public for any tertiary institution because, in actual sense, there are no uniform national UTME scores,” the board said in a statement on Monday.
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“The board, therefore, stated that there is no uniform minimum UTME score (cut-off) for all universities, polytechnics or colleges of education in Nigeria because each institution determines and submits to JAMB its minimum UTME score after analysing the UTME scores of its applicants against its available quota.
“It should, therefore, be noted that decisions reached at the annual policy meeting on admission do not reduce this minimum prescription emanating from the institutions except in a few situations where these institutions had submitted minimum UTME scores that fall below what the policy meeting considers as the acceptable minimum score. That is where the much-talked-about 140 came from, which is but a baseline that no institution should cross,” JAMB said in a statement.
JAMB stressed that it conducts the UTME and hands over the results to institutions for the conduct of admissions. The board said,” before the admission exercise would commence, a policy meeting was usually held with all the heads of the institutions in attendance and chaired by the minister of education.
“At this meeting, the admission guidelines, which include recommendations from individual institutions and their preferred minimum admission scores, are presented and deliberated upon and not JAMB.”
“Prior to the meeting, for instance, more than 50 percent of the universities had submitted in writing their minimum scores of 200 and above to the board for presentation to the meeting for the purpose of deliberation. The same applied to the other tiers of tertiary institutions. The implication of this process is that no institution would be able to admit any candidate with any score below what it had submitted as its minimum scores, the board explained.
