Less Than One Third of UTME Candidates Would Secure Admission- Minister of Education

Within the last 5 months, so much has been said about the faith and continued existence of the Joint Admission and Matriculations Board (JAMB), despite this uncertainty JAMB examinations were conducted throughout the nation on Saturday.

Despite all the media coverage on the proposed dismantling of the exam, the Minister of Education, Prof. Ruqayyatu Rufai, saturday disclosed that she had no knowledge of any White Paper recommending the scrapping of the UTME and the National Examination Council (NECO).

It is estimated that about 1.6 million candidates sat for the examination in 3,127 centres across the country and in six foreign centres in Accra, Ghana; Buea, Cameroon; Cotonou, Republic of Benin; London; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. About 145 visually impaired candidates and 196 inmates of Kaduna and Lagos prisons also sat for the examination.

Apart from the “paper based testing”, it is estimated that about 100,000 candidates are expected to participate in the Computer-Based Testing (CBT) from May 18 to June 1.

But the Minister of Education, Prof. Rufai , has disclosed that less than one third out of those who sat for the UTME would secure admission into the nation’s universities this is in no small measure due to the current state of the universities and their current admissions capacity.

Rufai disclosed this during a monitoring exercise of the conduct of the exams in Abuja where she added that the tertiary institutions have a low carrying capacity. “The entire space we have is 520,000. If one million pass, what are we going to do with the rest 500,000. We will not expand the carrying capacity without expanding the facilities,” she said.

Rufai added that the government would consider the possibility of regulating the fees charged by private institutions to allow access by middle income Nigeria.

On the general conduct of the examination, the Board’s spokesperson, Mr. Fabian Benjamin, said the examination was successful, peaceful and that it went as planned. He said the rise in the number of candidates this year was as a result of the new degree-awarding status of the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) and the Police Academy, which requires students to sit for UTME to secure admission.

In  Akure, the Ondo State  capital, some candidates wrote the test without being able to do the biometric data verification.

While in Abia state, tragedy stroke when about nine candidates for the JAMB examination where feared died as a result of an accident along the ever-busy Aba-Port Harcourt Expressway.