JAMB: Unilag rejects 59,000 candidates

Unilag protest

University of Lagos has rejected about 59,000 candidates who applied for admission into the school through the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB).

This was irrespective of the fact that majority of the students scored above the Board’s cut-off mark.

Speaking in an interview with Vanguard, JAMB spokesman, Mr Fabian Benjamin stated that the Board has entered into an agreement with the school to post the rejected students to other schools in Lagos environs.

Although, some protesting candidate claimed they are not aware of the JAMB posting, the exam body said candidates should check its website on Friday, August 5, 2015 to see the postings.

According to him, “Admission is not the way people think. We have Merit, Catchment and closeness to a state. Those are the criteria we are following to arrive at that list we sent to Unilag. It’s not about the cut off point, there are other considerations.”

“UNILAG has only 9000 capacity this years and that is why we are trying to push the others to other universities.”

And they will not understand we are trying to send them to schools that will admit them because Unilag can only take 9,000 but the students are not being patient with us to get this information across to them.”

“We sympathise with them but we wish to state categorically that the national cut off point is just the minimum expectation that each candidate desirous of university admission should have.

“However, universities are at liberty to go higher than 180, depending on their peculiarities and the performance of candidates who chose them”

“For instance, if over 10,000 candidates who made Unilag their first choice scored 250 and above, it will be difficult for them to go lower than 250 when they are to admit only about 9,000. “I wish to state that a time will come when some universities will go up to 300 as their cut off mark, depending on the performance,” the statement said.

It explained that because of the development, the board decided that some of the candidates who chose such institutions but fall below their cut off marks should not miss out, hence the need to send them to other schools.

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