JAMB New Admission Policy. What Candidates Should Know

The Joint Admission Matriculation Examination Board has come into the spotlight this week after JAMB began to redistribute candidates to Nigerian Universities for the post UMTE. JAMB’s admission policy is based on 45% merit, 35% from catchment areas(Candidates from States surrounding University of first choice), and 20% of candidates from Educationally disadvantaged States. Nigeria’s top Universities are Universities of Lagos, Ibadan, Ife, Ilorin, Nsuka, Benin. Non of these Universities has capacity for more than 9,000 students, but some of them have received admission requests in excess of 100,000. The admission spaces for Nigerian Universities in total is 450,000 for about 140 Universities and over 1,300,000 candidates wrote the 2015 Computer Based Test for entry into These Universities. University of Lagos for instance has about 9,000 spaces but over 32,000 scored above 200 in JAMB. So what’s the easy way out to get admitted into your choice University and choice course of study? You must study hard and be on the merit list of 45% for your University of choice. In order words to study Medicine, Law, Accounting, Computer Science, and Engineering in Nigeria’s top Universities you should score 275 and above to qualify for Post UMTE and your Post UMTE score has to be very good too, otherwise with scores lower than 275 there is no guarantee a candidate will qualify based on the other two criterium of “catchment area”and “educationally disadvantaged” State of origin.