The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) has commended the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) for what it called its strong commitment to bring sanity into tertiary school admissions in the country, saying the effort is really in the right direction.
The students’ body made this remark on Wednesday, in a statement signed by its Vice-President, External Affairs, Mr Babatunde Akinteye.
According to the association, we have watched closely in the recent past some of the moves taken by the leadership of JAMB, particularly the registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, and we can now conclude that those moves are to curb various sharp practices trailing admission processes in our tertiary institutions.
Making reference, NANS said it constituted a team led by its vice-president in charge of external affairs, Babatunde Akinteye, to monitor the just concluded registration exercise by the direct entry applicants when the issue of applicants having difficulty to register came up particularly in Lagos.
“Our team went to JAMB office in Lagos around 11:00 pm in one of the days closed to the deadline and met some applicants sleeping over in the office just for them to register.
“We were not happy about the development and we sought an audience with the leadership of JAMB to find out reasons for using only JAMB offices in each state for Direct Entry registration this year unlike the previous years when the exercises were carried out at various JAMB accredited CBT centres nationwide.
“We thought initially that JAMB would not grant us audience but it did and we were shock to be told and with evidence that the reason to restrict Direct Entry registration centres to JAMB offices this year was to prevent another round of admission abnormalities going on in some tertiary institutions in the country.
“Part of these is that some students do purchase Ordinary National Diploma (OND) certificates from some schools and use the same to register for Direct Entry admission either in the universities or polytechnics and most times, they scaled through undetected.
“We were told that this unhealthy practice has been going on for years undetected.
“But now that JAMB has been able to discover the practice, it devised a mean to curb it by restricting the registration centres to few and streamline the process to enable it to properly monitor and supervise the exercise.”
