By Augustine Oduor
Nairobi, Kenya: Thousands of students miss university admission every year even after scoring the minimum entry grade of C+, but what pains more is the sight of hundreds more who fail to secure chance to pursue their dream career though with the right qualifications.
Many such students will suffer this year, yet again, when they finally realise even after scoring an aggregate mean grade of A (plain), they may still not study that Medicine or Engineering course they chose.
The Standard can today reveal how the Joint Admissions Board arrives at the list of the privileged few to study certain competent courses and how others are locked out.
Outgoing JAB chairman Prof James Tuitoek said the selection criterion is based on merit and choices made by the students. However, these premises are hinged on capacities of the public universities.
Tuitoek, who is also the Egerton University vice chancellor, said the selection process starts by all public universities declaring their capacity for every course to the JAB secretariat.
“This year we had a total of 53,010 candidates who sat last year’s KCSE exams and qualified for university admission,” he said.
Based on an electronic merit list from the Kenya National Examination Council, JAB then establishes the number of students who scored grade A in all the seven subjects, which translated to 84 points, he explained.
(Grade A has 12 points, A- 11 points and B+ 10 points. This valuation goes down to E, which is equal to one point.)
“We then list all students who scored an A- grade and six As (83 points) followed by those who scored two grade A- and five As (82 points) and then those who scored three A- and four As (81 points).”
Statistics from JAB indicate that last year 267 candidates scored A in all the seven subjects, 416 scored one A- and six As, 576 scored two A- and five As and another 711 scored three A- and four As. All of them scored a mean grade of A, but with different points.
“The process is repeated for all other students who scored a mean grade of A-, B+, B, B- and C+ until we realise the stated universities total capacity which was 53,010. A line is then drawn there,” explained Tuitoek.
This means any student who scores C+ and above and does not, in order of merit, fall within this universities’ capacity is locked out.
Affirmative action
“This is how the first phase of the selection process goes and the cut off point is generated,” he said.
The cut off point is the mean grade of the last candidate in the merit list. For this year, the last candidate had a mean grade of B of 61 points.
However, Tuitoek says JAB considers other factors such as gender and hardship areas in setting the cut off point.
For this year, female students who scored two points lower than the cut off mark will be admitted as part of the traditional affirmative action policy. This means women with a minimum mean grade of B plain of 60 and B- of 59 points will get admission.
“We always strive to ensure women constitute about 40 per cent of the total number admitted,” he said.
The next stage of the process is where many students are depressed and others lose hope in life as they fail to get their dream choices.
“Further analyses of students data is done to look at the choices made by the individual students,” explained Tuitoek.
A merit list per programme is generated for all the universities. This helps to know, for instance, the total number of students who applied for Medicine as their first choice at the University of Nairobi, he said.
“A complete merit list is generated for all the universities that offer Medicine and the students who made them their first choice,” he said.
This is also weighted against the available capacity for each university.
“If the University of Nairobi can only take 30 students and those who qualified are 50, it means 20 qualified students are locked out of the course, and they cannot be enrolled for the same course at any other university,” said Tuitoek.
He said those left out may have had grade A in all subjects but they cannot be enrolled at another university that has candidates scored lower grade.
“This explains why a student who has a mean grade of A fails to get a Medicine course at one university yet another who scored A-, B+ or even B gets chance in another university for the same course,” said Tuitoek.
The tragedy
And in case the left out candidates are to get chances in other universities, they do not get first priority because there are students who made their second choice a first choice.
“However, those who lose in first round of selection always have a chance to revise their courses,” he said.
He said even at the revision, if students are not guided, they still apply for competitive courses even when they have not properly qualified. JAB then allocates courses to those who are again locked out at this stage.
