Olusola Oyewole, professor/vice chancellor, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), says the institution will soon resume academic session after it was shutdown following a violent students’ protest.
The vice chancellor, who joined some officials of National Universities Commission (NUC) on 2016/2017 Admission Screening for prospective candidates of the institution in Abeokuta at the weekend, said the committee saddled with the responsibility to investigate the crisis had submitted the report.
Oyewole said: “The committee that was set up to investigate the recent students’ unrest has just submitted its report, and the Senate would soon sit to consider the report and take a decision on the new resumption date for the University.”
Speaking on the screening exercise, the deputy vice chancellor (academic) and the chief coordinating officer for the 2016/2017 Pre-Admission Screening Exercise, Oluyemisi Eromosele, said out of the 17,334 applicants that applied for admission, only about 3,800 would eventually be admitted after the exercise.
Eromosele said though 17,334 candidates applied for both the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and Direct Entry, spreading across the 10 colleges of the university, FUNAAB has a quota of 3,850, as approved by NUC for the past two years.
She further stated, “we are also hoping that there would be a supplementary admission later on in the month while shortlisted candidates would equally be screened.”
Speaking on the criteria used in inviting students for the screening exercise, Eromosele said “we used the composite scores of 50 per cent of their school certificate results and 50 percent of their JAMB scores.
“We have cases of some students with very high JAMB scores, who did not input their WAEC results properly and because of that, we could not process their results. There were also cases of those with high scores but wrong JAMB subject combinations and they were screened out at the first stage”.
But, commending the admission screening, Mohammed Tanko, senior information and monitoring officer of NUC, Mohammed Tanko, who lauded members of staff of FUNAAB and other government officials that participated in the exercise, warned the University not breach the directive of the Federal Government given on students’ admission.
He said, “I am very proud of the process and the formation of the panel because we have to ensure that candidates, who are qualified, are admitted while those who do not merit admission do not come and take the place of those who we really need to be productive agents in the future.”
Speaking on why they had chosen FUNAAB as first choice, Ebunoluwa Adetola said “it is because it (FUNAAB) is one of the best universities in the country”, adding that although she applied to study Home Science and Management, she was offered Aquaculture and Fisheries Management, saying she was happy with the offer.
Sharing her experience after the screening exercise, Ebunoluwa said “the process was well planned as there were buses to convey students to their various screening centres and a comfortable venue was also set up for students to sit before they direct them into their screening centres. With these arrangements, I do not feel stressed up or tensioned”.
