JAMB: People Gained Admission with as Low as Zero Score – Oloyede

Board’s Registrar, Yaba College of Technology, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, shared his vision, challenges and successes in a recent interview with journalists.

Speaking about his experience at JAMB, he said: If I can think of any major challenge, I think it is the issue of trust. Many people do not know the value of trust. Many people make promises that they do not intend to keep. For example, over the years, we have been declaring what we call national cut off, 200, 180 and so on and so forth. But to my chagrin, to my surprise, when I got to JAMB, I realised that it was just a paper tiger. People were being admitted with as low as zero; it depends on who and how.

How did it happen? He said “candidates who did not take JAMB at all, who did not obtain the form would find themselves in universities and in first class programmes. And all they had to do was to pay N5,000 at the point of graduation, and the abnormality would then be said to have been regularised.”

Oloyede maintains that this issue must be dealt with and he explains how it is being done in 2017.

“If an institution says my cut-off is 240 that institution cannot admit 239; if an institution says my cut-off is 120, that institution cannot admit 119. It does not mean that that institution must take anybody with 120, no, the institution is prepared to go down to as low as 120 if there are no other scorers of higher grades. But once you have people with 180, 190, you cannot dump them and go to 120.

“But if you say your minimum score is 120, you cannot turn round and tell me that, look oh, my minimum score is 180 but I cannot find candidates and that is why I want to admit candidates with 160, no! You cannot do so; you must take the availability of candidates into consideration, your capacity for admission into account before determining your minimum cut-off.

“But the minimum cut-off this year is not just one per institution, you have institutional cut-off, you also have programme cut-off. That was why University of Ilorin could say, yes, my cut-off is 180 but that 180 is for History, Physics, French and so on. But for Medicine, it is 245, for Engineering it is 220. You have programme-specific cut-offs determined, and again UTME score is not the only parameter for admission this year,” he said.