The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that the minimum admissible scores for the 2025/2026 academic session have been fixed at 150 for universities, 100 for polytechnics, 100 for colleges of education, and 140 for colleges of nursing sciences.
The announcement was made Tuesday in a statement posted on the Board’s official X (formerly Twitter) page.
“The minimum admissible scores for admissions for the next academic session have been fixed at 150 for universities, 100 for polytechnics, 100 for colleges of education and 140 for colleges of nursing sciences by the stakeholders,” the board stated
The cut-off marks were agreed upon by stakeholders, which include heads of tertiary institutions across the country, during the 2025 JAMB Policy Meeting held in Abuja.
The establishment of minimum cut-off marks is part of JAMB’s effort to strike a balance between maintaining academic standards and widening access to tertiary education. It also helps guide institutions in their admission decisions and ensures uniformity in the system.
The process of setting these national minimum scores involves deliberations among vice-chancellors, rectors, provosts, and heads of relevant regulatory agencies. These institutions are allowed to set their own cut-off marks above the national minimum, but not below it.
This means while a university may choose to adopt a cut-off of 180 or higher, no university is allowed to admit a candidate with a UTME score below 150. The same applies to other tiers of tertiary education.
In 2024, JAMB officially approved 140 as the national minimum cut-off mark for admission into Nigerian universities, while polytechnics and colleges of education were set at 100.
This benchmark, known as the National Minimum Tolerable UTME Score (NTMUS), was agreed upon during the 2024 Annual Policy Meeting on Admissions held at the National Judicial Institute in Jabi, Abuja.
Despite allegations of malpractice and technical glitches that led to a national resit, JAMB confirmed that only about 21.5% of candidates achieved scores above 200.