The vice chancellor of the University of Ilorin (Unilorin), Ilorin, Kwara State, Professor Abdulganiyu Ambali, has said the decision not to offer admission to 711 candidates after the institution had collected money from them, was to teach the rejected candidates lessons for misguiding the institution.
Speaking with newsmen in Ilorin, at the weekend, the vice chancellor described the hue and cry over the withdrawal of the school’s provisional admission from the affected candidates after they had made payment as uncalled for, saying that they should rather be prosecuted
It was reported that authorities of the university had offered admission to no fewer than 2,000 candidates and afterwards withdrew the admission from the candidates.
“The issue of people trying to say we collected their money and refused to offer them admission is uncalled for. They wasted our time. In any civilised society those people should be prosecuted. That is examinations malpractice. If ab initio, those people are using fraudulent means to come in, you can imagine what they will do when they become our students fully. But we thought they are young people, we say they should learn by losing the opportunity. They can reapply. We thought they have to be taught a lesson and that is why we kept quiet.
“They are just trying to portray the university negatively. You know the university has come a long way. For the last three years we have been the most patronised university with over 100,000 applicants wanting to come and join us. Before now, we had the opportunity of post-UTME where we graded the scores of those candidates to sieve out the ones we wanted, but that is history as post-UTME had been cancelled.
“We are now to screen the candidates. We now set up a committee that would come up with a method of screening the candidates. We had over 100,000 applicants competing for between 10,000 and 12,000 spaces and you have to devise a means of telling about 90,000 to go home. We had to do that objectively. During the first screening before we made any move to admit anybody, we used the screening based on what we had to prune down the number of candidates.
“Out of the 103,000 that applied we pruned it down to 60,000. We now asked the 60,000 to upload their Senior Secondary School Certificate (SSSC) results. Many people did and based on what they uploaded the committee graded their results.”
“That was the basis of our first admission list amounting to about 70 per cent of our carrying capacity. Probably about 7,000 and we then told them to either accept or reject the admission offer. So many candidates accepted it.
“And the next stage was come for screening along with the originals of the SSSC results they had uploaded. When they brought them we compared them with what they uploaded. That was when we saw the difference. Some people that had C6 uploaded B1, some A1. Then we said they had misguided us because it was based on what you uploaded that we graded and offered you provisional admission. That was why we rejected some of the candidates.
“Some instead of giving the grades that they didn’t have filled in the subjects they did not write during SSSC examinations. We had different categories of candidates that misguided us when we were doing the grading to arrive at the first batch.
“The total number of those that couldn’t make it in the first three batches is not up to 2000. The number is 711. Out of 60,000 candidates 711 filled in wrong results; the percent of that is about 20 something or less,” he said.
The professor of Veterinary Medicine denied that the suspension of two leaders of a factional Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) loyal to the national ASUU by university authorities did not have any link with their petition against him. The suspended ASUU leaders are factional chair and his secretary.
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