The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it has released a new set of reforms and other preparations for the 2017 UTME adding that all is now set to commence the sale of its application documents in March, 2017.

A statement issued by the board reads:

“We sincerely appreciate the patience exhibited by Nigerians in allowing us take time to add value to the services we have been offering to Nigerians for over three decades.

“Because we need a different and progressive result that will position Nigerian educational system in an enviable height in the comity of nations, then we must do things differently. The Board is poised to see that a reasonable percentage of candidates who take this examination and are qualified find placement in tertiary institutions.

“In the cause of conducting admission exercise, many institutions have admitted candidates on merit only for them to discover that such candidates do not have qualified O’levels results or the right combination for admission and had to delete and start the process all over again. With this, they would have denied other qualified candidates the opportunities for admissions.

“This we are addressing by ensuring that no candidate is henceforth recommended without his O’levels result being supplied. To achieve this, JAMB will insist that candidates supply their result on its website during registration or later, but before admissions commences for them to be considered for admissions. We believe this will allow only qualified candidates to be considered for admissions.

“We have designed a Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) where the Board will interface with the institutions and ensure the compliance of this reform. The summary is that no candidate will be admitted with awaiting result. Candidates and their parents are also to note that the Board has restructured the registration platform to allow for only one choice of Public University. The new registration platform will now be first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice and not most preferred, preferred etc as it was.

Candidates’ first choice can be a College, University, Innovative Enterprises Institutions or Polytechnic/Monotechnic. However, if a candidate makes a Public University his first choice, he will not have any public University to choose for 2nd, 3rd and 4th choice. He will have on the remaining three choices, a College, a Polytechnic, Private University and IEI’S. However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select NCE (College) or ND (Polytechnic/Monotechnic) as their 1st choice up to 3rd choice and the 4th IEI. They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their 1st choice up to the 4th choice, but can only pick a public university once.

“This restructuring is to expand the opportunities available to candidates as almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list because they hardly exhaust their first choice.

“The registration of UTME this year will go side by side with the  Direct Entry and during registration, candidates 10 fingers are to be captured using Biometric Verification Machine (BVN).

“Again, we want to inform candidates that no cyber café will be registering candidates for our examination. On no account should any candidate patronize any cybercafé for our registration. It is important to note that the Board will not deploy the use of any scratch card for the 2017 UTME registration exercise.”