The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) online application portal has been reopened to give students the third and final chance to choose courses, universities, and colleges afresh.
The move according to KUCCPS was prompted by the 9 percent of those who qualified for university admission and had not submitted any application.
The portal will however be closed on Saturday, July 8, 2023.
In a statement, KUCCPS said that 91 percent of the students who qualified for university admission in the 2022 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination have applied for placement to higher learning institutions, according to the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS).
“An analysis of the application data so far indicates that a total of 157,498 students who attained mean grades of C+ and above have applied, out of the 173,127 Kenyan citizens who qualified for admission to degree courses in the 2022 examination.”
In addition, KUCCPS says that the current revision of choices, which is the final application phase, also targets candidates who qualified for artisan certificate, craft certificate and diploma courses from the KCSE examinations of 2022 to 2000.
They are eligible to apply for the courses in government technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, and teacher training colleges.
Following the two-course revision phases that concluded recently, some applicants failed to get any of the courses they listed due to competition as placement is done on merit.
“I have observed that a lot of students are still fixated with the traditional degree courses like Medicine, which cannot accommodate all the qualified students applying for them,” said Dr. Agnes Mercy Wahome, the KUCCPS Chief Executive Officer.
This year, for instance, public universities provided a total of 523 slots in Medicine, Pharmacy and Nursing degree courses.
These and similar courses filled up quickly at the first phase of course selection, due to the large number of qualified students who applied for them.
Students who qualify for these programmes are those with mean grades ranging from B+ to A. In the 2022 examination, 1,156 candidates attained A, 6,658 scored A – (minus) and 15,938 got B+. Therefore, a total of 23,752 students scored these top grades.
“From the numbers, it is obvious that a student with A – (minus) or B+ is unlikely to get Medicine or any of the other competitive courses,” said Dr. Wahome.
“However, this does not lock them from enrolling in these courses as Module II students.”
The mistake that many of the top students do is applying for the traditional courses in universities where the cut-off trend for the programmes is too high, meaning the courses are very competitive, hence they miss.
As the final selection phase gets underway, previous applicants can confirm if they have secured a course by checking if their student’s portal displays a message indicating if they have secured a chance provisionally or not.
Any candidate who has secured a provisional placement is not required to reapply. Those who have secured courses should wait for KUCCPS to complete the placement process after which they will be provided with details of their courses and institutions, by September 2023.
Details of those who are required to select courses afresh have been published on the KUCCPS website, www.kuccps.ac.ke. The students have also been notified by SMS.
