Persons living with disabilities have been exempted from writing the post- Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (post-UTME) tests during the 2019 tertiary education admissions exercise.
The Federal Ministry of Education said on Tuesday that this affects visually impaired (blind) and auditory challenged (deaf) candidates who wrote the UTME for admission into universities and other tertiary institutions.
Also, international students and prisoners in Nigeria were also excluded from the exam as long as they meet up with the minimum admission requirements including UTME cutoff marks set by the institutions.
The ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Sonny Echono gave the directive describing such individuals were under the Special Needs category.
Echono spoke at the 2019 Admissions Policy meeting on Tuesday, 11th June convened by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) in Gbongan, Osun State.
He also directed that no tertiary institution charges above the ministry’s approved fee of N2000 for any post-UTME screening.
“The board and the tertiary institutions should ensure that candidates under the Special Needs category are considered for admission provided they meet the minimum requirements. They are; blind and deaf candidates, prison candidates, foreign centre candidates. These candidates should be exempted from any other test apart from the routine scrutiny of their credentials.
“In order to halt the substitution of candidates with impersonators, JAMB has been directed to make available to all tertiary institutions the facial and finger images of the candidates of each institution for screening. It is therefore not permitted for any tertiary institution to retake fresh photographs or fingerprints.”
EduCeleb.com earlier reported that the stakeholders at the meeting fixed the minimum UTME score for admission into public universities at 160 and for private universities at 150 amongst others.
Mr Echono emphasised the need for all tertiary institutions to stick with using the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) throughout the admissions process.
He added that heads of higher institutions had been asked to set up an Ombudsman system where all cases of unethical behaviours between lecturers and students could be reported.
“The system shall be monitored by the ministry and the regulatory bodies – the National Universities Commission, National Board for Technical Education and National Commission for Colleges of Education. All reported cases must be administratively disposed of within three months.”
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