The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is a Federal Government’s agency that conducts and standardize entrance examination into tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The body also sets cut-off point for its Unified Tertiary Matriculations Exams (UTME) every year.
Following the year 2022 edition of the UTME which held between Friday, May 6, and Saturday 14, the examination regulatory board, JAMB has on Thursday, 21 July announced 140 marks as the national minimum cut-off point for admission into public universities and 100 marks and above for admissions into Polytechnics and colleges of education for the year 2022 admissions exercise.
JAMB was reported to have reached this decision at the ongoing policy meeting on admissions to tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
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According to the JAMB’s registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede who announced the cut-off, every institution is at liberty to fix its own cut-off mark even up to 220 but no one would be allowed to go below the minimum marks of 140 for universities and 100 for polytechnics and colleges of education.
The just concluded UTME recorded mass failure as the JAMB’s registrar revealed that 378,639 candidates which is about 22 percent of the total 1,761,338 candidates who wrote the 2022 UTME scored 200 and above.
This is very pathetic…. Extremely pathetic. Being an IT staff in a Federal University, I was amongst the team of engineers that set up the exam centre for the students who came to write jamb.
I was opportuned to see the questions that was set, and to my amazement, even the difficulty level of jamb has drastically reduced. Despite writing my last jamb almost 20 years ago, I could still write that jamb and scale over 200 at the moment. I was shocked at the answers some were giving… Whether they really prepared for the exam, I am not aware.
Those days, before you write jamb, you must have consumed ababio, PN Okeke, Abbott, Nelkon and others, back to back to pass Jamb. You must have studied the previous 5 years jamb questions. That does not even guarantee that you excel in Jamb. Those days, you would see full grown men write jamb with you but nowadays, you hardly them, yet they fail woefully.
I became totally afraid that if this continues this way, the future of Nigeria is totally at stake. In the next 30 years, only God knows what would be of this nation.
Just to give you the idea of the gravity of this situation, a lady in my venue was told she has five minutes left and she has not done two subjects because she didn’t know she had to answer the 4 subjects. I was wondering whether she fell from the sky or what. I do not even know who to blame. The standard if education in Nigeria has fallen. It’s well with this nation