Abstract:
The number of applicants who apply for University admission through JAMB (UME) in
Nigeria is increasing yearly. Unfortunately, the facilities in the Nigerian Universities
have not been expanding commensurately with the increasing number of applicants.
Consequently, large number of applicants has to be screened yearly by university
admission officers in order to select the few that their universities facility could cope
with.
For instance, there are well over 500,000 candidates seeking admission into Nigerian
Universities yearly and less than 15% of them secure admission.
Admission officers have to manually evaluate every candidate's data against the set
admission requirements before selecting the few successful ones.
As such, this manual admission processing system exhibits three major problems viz: It is laborious to manually evaluate the data of a very large number of candidates only to end up selecting less than 15% of them, because of the enormous work involved, most
candidates are dropped off immediately they fail to meet the admission requirements for
their chosen course whereas, they could have met admission requirements for some other courses for which they could have been considered for placement, and the admission screening procedure is not transparent to the applicants and as such, many unsuccessful applicants find it difficult to believe that they are not offered admission for objective reasons.
An effort towards developing a system that can take care of these problems is therefore a step in the right direction. This model is therefore being developed to: provide a time efficient, detailed and unbiased automated procedure for selecting the most qualified
candidates for admission into universities, ensure that candidates who fail to meet some of the admission requirements for their chosen course are automatically considered for placement into another course for which they meet the admission requirements provided there are vacant positions, and provide avenue for student self-screening admission system.