Posted by By Olubusuyi Adenipekun on
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the wide disparity between the number of candidates who apply to it for admission yearly and the actual figure of those who finally secure placements in tertiary institutions across the country.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the wide disparity between the number of candidates who apply to it for admission yearly and the actual figure of those who finally secure placements in tertiary institutions across the country.
According to the Registrar/Chief Executive of the Board, Professor Bello Ahmed Salim, less than 200,000 in about one million qualified candidates secure university admission every year, mainly due to lack of space in existing universities. And as thousands of candidates are currently obtaining application forms for the 2005 Universities Matriculation Examination (UME), the expansion of facilities, such as lecture theatres, libraries and hostels in existing universities will, according to him, enable the institutions to admit more qualified candidates.
Salim says this is necessary because admission is based on spaces available in various institutions, and that is why admission exercises are jointly carried out by JAMB and the admission offices of various institutions, which fix cut-off points based on available spaces.
Currently, Nigeria has 24 federal universities with four inter-university centres; 21 state government-owned universities and 13 private universities. But they still remain inadequate for the teeming number of qualified candidates seeking admissions to them. While 1,039,183 candidates sat for UME in 2003, over 800,000 sat for the 2004 examination.
But not even any of the first generation universities - considered relatively large - has the capacity to admit more than 5,000 students at any given year. Many of the other smaller universities can hardly admit up to 3,000 each at a time. And that is why each of these universities has a population of full-time students far less than 28,000.
One of the major considerations why the National Universities Commission (NUC) has been issuing licences to private universities is to expand admission opportunities to as many qualified candidates as possible. But their impact in this regard has remained rather marginal.
The Igbinedion University, Okada, for example, received 14,000 applications for admission in the current academic session but only a little above 1,000 candidates were admitted. The same thing happened at Covenant University, Ota, Ogun state where 5,000 qualified candidates applied for admission with only 1,682 finally securing places in the Christian mission institution.
It should, however, be noted that the problem of inadequate spaces for candidates seeking admission to tertiary institutions is by far more pronounced in the southern part of the country. This is due to the fact that the bulk of the candidates seeking admission to universities come from the south, with the lowest number of applications coming from northern states every year.
Presenting an analysis of application by states, Salim announced that of 838,051 candidates who completed and returned application forms for the 2004 UME, from Imo State came 91,982 applications; Delta - 70,496; Anambra - 52,468; Edo - 52,280; Ogun - 47,180 and Akwa Ibom - 46,232.
According to the Registrar, the breakdown
of the six states that recorded the lowest number of applications are: Kebbi - 2,601; Bauchi - 2,557; Sokoto - 2,193; Zamafra - 1,810; Jigawa - 1,525 and Yobe - 1,438.
This abysmally low northern entries is not peculiar to 2004 UME. There has, according to Salim, been no remarkable improvement in northern enrolment over the years. Of the 400,194 candidates who wrote the examination in 1999, Salim said that from the combined states of Borno, Katsina, Taraba, Sokoto, Kebbi and Yobe came only 5,619 candidates, representing only 1.32 per cent of the sum total. Still analysing applications from states in the same examination, he further revealed that all the 19 northern states combined produced only 65,000 candidates, which is just 20,726 higher than the 44,274 candidates produced by Imo State alone.
The same situation of wide disparity between northern and southern entries was also recorded in 2003 UME. Having the highest number of JAMB's applications are: Imo -110,840; Delta - 88,476; Anambra - 78,549; Edo - 68,767; Ogun - 59,281 and Osun - 49,225.
The following six states, Salim said, had the lowest applications: Katsina - 3,395; Kebbi - 3,140; Taraba - 2,920; Yobe - 2,207; Zamfara - 2,046 and Sokoto - 1,917.
Does it then mean that youths are in short supply in northern states? Salim answers in the negative. "The problem is not with the population. The youths are there in large numbers, but they only seem not to be interested."
The statistics on application by states as given by Professor Salim implies that tertiary institutions in the south will surely be congested with students while those in the north will be relatively light. This situation obtains because candidates have the freedom to apply to two universities of their choice. And most of them prefer to apply to those institutions that are close to their states of origin or those that are known for academic excellence in some programmes.
The preference of candidates for many institutions inexorably leads to very stiff competition to get admitted there. To meet the high cut-off points of some courses in those preferred universities, parents and students resort to perpetrating various examination malpractices. According to Salim, supervisors' reports from different examination towns across the country indicated that various forms of examination malpractices were committed in last year's UME. Emphasising that malpractices are reducing, Salim disclosed that of 838,051 candidates who sat for the examination, 58,121 had their results withheld for committing examination malpractices.
Widespread cheating, Salim said, was specifically reported in the following 14 states; Abia, Akwa-Ibom, Anambra, Bayelsa, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Enugu, Imo, Kogi, Lagos, Ondo, Osun and Rivers. He says: "Furthermore, our investigation revealed that massive collusion through the notorious activities of "mercenaries" took place at 17 examination towns. Although, incidence of examination malpractice is decreasing rapidly in the board's matriculation examinations, JAMB will not relent in fighting this menace until it is completely eradicated."
One major way of dealing with the scourge is the board's innovation of juggling questions in each subject with each question paper being labelled such as, economics type A, B or C. The question papers are then arranged in such a way that candidates sitting for the same subject and sitting close to each other in the same examination hall have different questions paper types to tackle. Thus, question number one in, say, economics type A will be different from that of type B and a student who copies answers from his or her neighbour will definitely be copying wrong answers.
This and other ingenious innovations which Salim describe as efforts to "maintain the sanctity of our examinations" have reduced the incidence of malpractices in the examinations being conducted by the board. But the will to eradicate it completely must flow from all stakeholders: students, parents, guardians and even governments which need to expand facilities in existing institutions across the country.