At the 2021 policy meeting which was held virtually and chaired by the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu on Tuesday, the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has cancelled the general cut-off marks for admission into tertiary institutions and has given freedom to respective institutions to set their individual minimum cut-off for admission.

Speaking during the meeting, the Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, revealed that some universities such as University of Maiduguri proposed 150, Usman Dan Fodio University, Sokoto proposed 140, Pan Atlantic University proposed 210, University of Lagos 200, Lagos State University 190, Covenant University 190, and Bayero University Kano, 180.

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While the stakeholders approved October 29, 2021 as the deadline for the closure of amendments for 2021 admissions, it also resolved to allow the Federal Ministry of Education to decide as they could not agree on December 31, 2021 deadline for all public institutions and January 2022 for all private institutions for the closure of admission.

The stakeholders also adopted the 2021 admission guidelines, which provide that all applications for part time or full-time programmes for degree, NCE, OND and others must be posted only through JAMB. For Direct Entry (DE), the maximum score a candidate can present is six and the minimum is two or E, as required by law.

While speaking on other admission criteria, Oloyede said the candidate’s credentials must be uploaded on Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) to be recommended by the institution, while JAMB approves and the candidate accepts the offer of admission.

He said if candidates have not accepted an offer, the institution can change the candidate after informing JAMB.

Also approved were the guidelines that every institution is at liberty to admit candidates based on its own minimum score approved by the institution and the policy meeting.

Oloyede further disclosed that for 2021/2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), the board is introducing two new subjects — computer studies and physical and health education — bringing to a total of 25 subjects.

Speaking on the 2020 admissions, Oloyede said out of the 956,809 admission spaces in the 962 higher education institutions in the country, about 600,000 have so far been admitted.

While saying there are many admission spaces that have not been filled up in several courses due to lack of qualified candidates, the JAMB registrar said private universities in the country were only able to admit 36,381 candidates out of the 120,938 spaces available to them.