THE 2016 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) will begin tomorrow and is expected to last “not more than 14 days,” the Registrar/Chief Executive Officer of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor ‘Dibu Ojerinde, has stated.

The JAMB Registrar maintained that a total number of 1,589,175 candidates applied for the 2016 UTME as against the 1,475,477 candidates, which registered for the 2015 UTME, noting that 343 prison inmates and 201 Visually Impaired candidates registered for the 2016 UTME.

The examination, he said, will hold simultaneously in 521 examination centres in Nigeria and eight foreign centres; Accra in Ghana, Buea in Republic of Cameroun, Cotonou in Republic of Benin, London in United Kingdom, Jeddah in Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia, Johannesburg in Republic of South Africa, Addis in Ethiopia and Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire.

Ojerinde, in a press statement made available to newsmen, on Thursday, commended President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government, education stakeholders and the press, among others, for the support the Board has received in the course of preparations for the examination.

This is just as he disclosed that the board has, in a bid to reduce the high rate of successful candidates not being able to secure admission into tertiary institutions due to limited spaces, fine-tuned the candidates redistribution policy, which generated controversy last year, by “introducing another choice after the preferred choices amongst schools that are under-subscribed, to enable candidates take up a second opportunity if they failed to get their first preferred choice.”

The JAMB Registrar also explained the misconception about cut-off points, which he said were not set by JAMB but “by the policy committee chaired by the Honourable Minister of Education with the Board, Vice-Chancellors, Provost of Education, Rectors of Polytechnics, Monotechnics and so on,” noting that the 180 cut-off point is a minimum requirement and not an indication that any candidate who scores 180 would be admitted. He said institutions could go higher than 180, depending on their peculiarity, without infringing on the powers of the Board.