The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said candidates who are awaiting their O’Level results can sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME).JAMB spokesperson, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, who made the clarification in a statement issued on Thursday in Abuja, also said the board would not confirm any admission for candidates with awaiting result.
According to him,this would enable JAMB grant admission to only qualified candidates who are ready to advance their educational pursuit in tertiary institutions, conserve resources and also provide credible data.
Benjamin advised candidates to upload their O’level results on JAMB’s website before the end of August this year.
“Candidates with awaiting results are eligible to sit for our examination. They are eligible to register for our examination and sit for our examination. However, the board will not confirm any admission for any candidate with awaiting result.
“All candidates who are desirous of tertiary education are to upload their O’level result on our site. Don’t forget, this O’level result is also a major requirement for admission among other requirements.
“What we expect is that after obtaining your O’level result, you go to our website you upload it. At the point of admission, it is expected that they would have uploaded their O’level results on our website before the end of August.
“We expect that by August, any candidate that does not have his or her result uploaded by end of August is not eligible for admission. We have met with WAEC, NECO and other examination bodies and told them this is the direction we are going”, he stated.
He said the organisation discovered that most of the 1.5 million candidates who sit for its UTME annually do not have the necessary requirements for admission.
“We have a reasonable number that are not actually qualified for this exam and are competing for spaces they are not qualified for.
“We don’t want to be doing admission for candidates that are not qualified to be admitted. It is a waste of resources, it distort our data. We discovered overtime that most of the time when these candidates are admitted they don’t meet the requirements.
“We want to be sure (of) who we are admitting into the tertiary institution so that at the end of the day if we say 3000 students are admitted in University A, Polytechnic A and Colleges of education A, our data will truly reflect 3000 candidate in that particular institution,” he said.
He added that candidates, who are not computer literate, have a choice of applying for a UTME mock examination at a fee of N700, 00 nationwide.
Benjamin explained that the UTME mock examination was optional and aimed at allowing students have a feel of the Computer Based Test (CBT), especially those ignorant of the CBT process.
