- Says new policy’ll destroy tertiary education
The Vice Chancellor of the Delta State University, Abraka, Prof. Victor Peretemode, has criticised the Minister of Education, Alhaji Adamu Adamu, and the Joint Admission Matriculation Board for scrapping the Post –Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
According to Peretemode, scrapping of the Post-UTME will destroy tertiary education in the country and encourage laziness among students.
The DELSU vice chancellor said JAMB was confused and creating more chaos in the admission process, stressing that neither the minister for education nor JAMB had the right to determine admission processes into the universities.
Peretemode, who spoke with our correspondent, argued that under the Nigerian Constitution, the Senate of any university is the highest law-making body saddled with the responsibility of admitting students into any university.
He said, “I think JAMB is confused and it wants to create more chaos or is creating chaos in the admission process and what it is established to do. I think JAMB is poke nosing into the affairs of university administration.
“The university has been established by law and it is the Senate of any university that is saddled with the responsibility of admitting students. That is the law and not a proclamation or an executive action. The law says that the Senate is the highest academic policy making body to admit students and in admitting the students, it also screen student before admission and also charge fees.
“According to the 1999 constitution, as amended, higher education is in the concurrent list. So whoever is in charge of JAMB and the minister of education cannot just wake up overnight and make decisions and force them down the throat of all vice chancellors of universities.
“We are the ones who admit and we know the kind of students we want to admit. And for us to know the kind of students we admit, we should be allowed to screen the students. So, for JAMB to come and say they have scrapped post-UTME, it does not make sense.
“This year’s JAMB is one of the worst ever to be conducted in the history of Nigeria. If you could remember, JAMB just added forty marks to the scores of students. We know where they are headed. What is going to happen is this, rich parents will be going to JAMB to fix students’ scores like what used to be obtained in the past because there was no post-UTME.”
The DELSU VC further accused JAMB of allegedly compounding the problems in the university system, adding that under a Federal system like Nigeria, universities should be free to manage the processes for admitting students.
“Do they know what is involved in screening students? They have not even be able to work out the modalities but here in DELSU we have been able to work out the modalities in screening students though we have not yet started post- UTME.
“We have screened students and in the course of screening students, we know what happens. For example, we have screened a student who have scored so well in English in JAMB and we asked him to spell ‘correction’ and he was unable to spell it. We asked a student who have scored A1 in Biology and did very well in JAMB to define ‘cell’, but he could not. Are these the type of students you want us to admit into our institutions?
