By 
Olanrewaju Oyedeji
A voice of dissent has come to the flurry of calls and opinions from concerned quarters for the scrapping of the Joint Admission Matriculation Board, JAMB following recent failings in its conduct of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Despite those failings, the Federal Government is being charged not to scrap the body.
Addressing newsmen on Wednesday, April 13, 2016, the Vice Chancellor of Adeleke University, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria, Prof. Oluwole Amusan, says that rather the body should be reformed.
He spoke at the permanent site of the institution in Ede, Osun state.
Amusan urged JAMB to tidy up its house and prevent any re-occurrence of the challenges it has faced this far.
He described the controversy trailing the new admission policy of JAMB as unfortunate, stressing that the challenges were caused by “societal evils.”
He also dismissed calls for Nigerian higher institutions to be conducting their own matriculation examinations saying doing such would drag the nation’s education system back to the problem of multiple admission offers for individual admission seeker.
The VC also defended the use of computer-based test for the UTME saying its a modern trend.
He said: “its quite unfortunate that JAMB is facing this challenge. Before now, JAMB has been performing creditably well and I think this problem it is facing is caused by our societal evils.
“Although I am not holding brief for JAMB or the federal government, but I think JAMB has been securing us from the challenge of multiple admissions for students and this problem has been denying other students opportunity to gain admission.
“Getting students admitted is now a unified process and JAMB has institutionalized a uniform standard of gaining admission to Nigerian institutions. If JAMB should be scrapped and institutions are allowed to conduct admission examinations themselves, these old problems would suffice,” Amusan added.
Prof. Amusan concluded that his own “Adeleke University aspires to be the best in Nigeria and intends to achieve this through research funding, qualitative teaching and active collaboration with the media.”
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