The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it will commence sales of application forms for the 2017 screening in March.

A statement signed by the board Spokesperson, Fabian Benjamin also stated that candidates awaiting results would no longer be eligible to apply for the Universities Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.

According to JAMB, the development will take effect from 2017.

The statement further stated that candidates can now apply for first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice of institutions, scrapping out the most preferred, preferred choice earlier practiced.

According to Benjamin, the restructuring was aimed at expanding the opportunities available to candidates since almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list because they hardly exhaust their first choice.

He said, “We have designed a Central Admissions Processing System where the Board will interface with the institutions and ensure the compliance of this reform. The summary is that no candidate will be admitted with awaiting result. Candidates and their parents are also to note that JAMB has restructured the registration platform to allow for only one choice of public university. The new registration platform will now be first choice, second choice, third choice and fourth choice and not most preferred, preferred etc as it was.

“Candidates’ first choice can be a College, University, Innovative Enterprises Institutions or Polytechnic/Monotechnic. However, if a candidate makes a Public University his first choice, he will not have any public University to choose for second, third and fourth choice. He will have on the remaining three choices, a College, Polytechnic, Private University and IEI’S. However, candidates for the 2017 UTME can now select National Certificate in Education (College) or National Diploma (Polytechnic/Monotechnic) as their first choice up to third choice and the fourth IEI. They can select the IEI (Innovative Enterprise Institution, ND) as their first choice up to the fourth choice, but can only pick a public university once.”

JAMB added that the restructuring is to expand the opportunities available to candidates as almost all the public universities do not consider candidates on the second choice list because they hardly exhaust their first choice. (TV360 Nigeria)