In furtherance of its commitment to continuous improvement and efficiency in the discharge of its mandate, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has developed the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS) to automate the Admissions Process into the tertiary institutions, as another innovation from its stable.

CAPS streamlines the Admissions Process, addresses the challenges associated with the manual approach, restores the autonomy of the tertiary institutions with respect to admissions, makes candidates the focus and empowers them with information on available choices of institutions and programmes, expands admission opportunities, eliminates multiple admissions, and provides easily retrievable data for decision making and research on the Education Sector in the country. It also helps JAMB to refocus on its founding ideals as the Clearing House for admissions into the tertiary institutions in Nigeria.

Admissions Process has many stakeholders and actors whose roles and functions have been captured in CAPS. This User Guide (Tertiary Institutions Edition) provides information on how the Tertiary Institutions officers can operate and use the system to perform their own roles in the Admissions Process. It includes the roles of Admission Officer or the organ of the Institution saddled with the internal Admission Process as well as the Heads of the Institution (Vice-Chancellors, Registrars and Provosts) who have the final approval.

CAPS not only automates the process, a number of other innovations are being introduced. And these include opportunities for candidates to confirm provisional admissions thus eliminating cases of candidates abandoning admissions; market place to enable institutions source candidates from the available pool based on various criteria such as JAMB score, State, Local Government and even gender of the candidates; and the requirement for all awaiting O/L results candidates to upload their results into JAMB portal before being considered for admission. In addition, admissions can be processed in batches as well as instantaneously with candidates being able to check their admission status at any point in time on the JAMB portal. This facility will also be available through the USSD code on the major telephone operators in the country.

The 2017 / 2018 Admission exercise will be conducted in dual mode: the current manual process will run in parallel with the implementation of CAPS. However, starting from 2018 / 2019, the Admissions Process will be performed only using CAPS. It is expected that the dual mode implementation will provide sufficient opportunity for all the stakeholders to get familiar with the operations of the new system, obtain feedbacks and enhance the system for better delivery of the objectives.

It is my hope that the tertiary institutions and indeed all the stakeholders will take full advantage of the benefits CAPS offers to the Admissions Process and the Education Sector as a whole and that this User Guide will provide direction to the Admission Officers and the Heads of the Tertiary Institutions to take full advantage of the system.

Professor Is-haq Olanrewaju Oloyede, OFR, FNAL
Registrar, JAMB
Abuja, Nigeria