The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has said it
does not award “preferential cut-off marks” to students who sit the Unified
Tertiary Matriculation Examination from the northern part of the country.
The board also said the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir
El-Rufai, was wrong in saying that UTME candidates of northern extraction
enjoyed special privileges or lower cut-off marks not benefited by candidates
in other parts of the country.
JAMB’s Head of Information and Media, Fabian Benjamin, said
this in an interview with The PUNCH on Tuesday in reaction to the
governor’s comment on Monday.
El-Rufai, on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily breakfast
programme on Monday, said students from the North should not be awarded lower
cut-off marks, but should be made to compete with their counterparts from other
parts of the country for them to be competitive.
But Benjamin said JAMB had not been setting the minimum
scores for schools since its inception in 1978 as a government agency saddled
with the responsibility of “conducting matriculation examinations for entry
into all universities, polytechnics and colleges of education in the country
and to place suitably qualified candidates in the available places in these
institutions.”
The JAMB spokesman said, “We don’t give preferential or
differential cut-off marks to candidates. Candidates are admitted on the scores
as defined by institutions. As for the UTME, they sit for the examination and
it is what they obtain that is the basis for their selection after the policy
meeting has authorised the commencement of admission.
“There are no
preferential cut-off marks for anybody. What people refer to as the cut-off
mark is the minimum score and each institution sets its own minimum score; it
is a function of performance in the UTME for the year, subscription to
programmes and institutions that is how many candidates have applied to the
institutions or for the programmes. These are what push the minimum score
either up or down for institutions or programmes.
“The determining factor is the subscription to a particular
programme or school. If the subscription is very low, technically, it will
affect the minimum score for the programme.”
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