From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that the 2024 admission exercise into tertiary institutions will commence at the end of its annual policy meeting scheduled for Thursday.
The policy meeting is a platform that declares the commencement of the year’s admission exercise, setting the grundnorm that no institution is expected to violate, adding that sanctions await any institution that violates the collective norms.
It is also a platform to unveil the details of the 2024 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), including the candidate with the highest score, institutions with the highest application (first choice), and other detailed information regarding the 2024 UTME.
JAMB further explained that the policy meeting often attended by vice chancellors of universities, rectors of polytechnics, monotechnics, and innovation enterprise institutes, provosts of colleges of education, and other critical stakeholders, also provides a platform to consider and approve the guidelines for the 2024 admission exercise.
Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman, is expected to chair the meeting, and the decisions taken at the meeting are always collective one taken by all the participants, and not solely that of JAMB.
It added that the meeting would extensively review the performance of the 2023 admissions exercise and the 2024 UTME performance of candidates.
And most importantly, the minimum admission scores, an aggregation of individual institutions’ submissions, will be approved at the meeting.
“This is not a cut-off mark, as often misconstrued, but a minimum score that no institution should go below,” it said.
JAMB, thus, declared no institution is expected to commence the admission process until after the policy meeting, as the guidelines regulating the year’s admission exercise are often determined at the meeting with the endorsement of the education minister.
It said a key rule is that all admissions must be processed through the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS), and candidates who accept admission outside CAPS do so at their own risk.