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Inaugurates committee to overhaul systems
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The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has commenced an overhaul of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), with plans to introduce life skills and critical thinking into the assessment of candidates seeking admission into tertiary institutions.
JAMB Registrar Prof Segun Aina disclosed this on Wednesday in Abuja at the inauguration of a committee of education experts and stakeholders with the mandate to develop a framework for integrating life skills and critical thinking into the UTME.
He stressed that the current UTME format had remained largely unchanged for more than three decades and required a fundamental review to determine whether it was still relevant to the changing demands of tertiary education.
He said the reform was necessary because UTME primarily performs a ranking function among candidates who had already obtained O-Level qualifications, making it unnecessary for the examination to simply repeat subject-based assessments already conducted by examination bodies such as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and National Examinations Council (NECO).
“So ours is a ranking task. It’s not necessarily to test your subject matter expertise. So we feel that for the UTME examination to be purely subject matter is a duplication of effort of sorts,” Aina said.
He said JAMB is seeking to incorporate skills that candidates would deploy in real-life situations, particularly their ability to think critically, reason and solve problems.
The Registrar, however, questioned whether the existing methods used by JAMB to identify candidates most likely to succeed at university, polytechnic and college of education levels remained valid.
“Are the methods that we are employing to check and predict who will do well in the university or the polytechnic or the college of education, are they still valid? Are they good enough?” he asked.
Aina said the board had deliberately brought together experts and stakeholders from different segments of the education sector because JAMB could not determine the appropriate direction for UTME reform on its own.
“We cannot be judges in our own matter. So, the committee was expected to guide the board and ensure that any decision reached was broadly acceptable to all the stakeholders who will be affected by these decisions.”
He said the committee had an initial four weeks to examine the proposal from a conceptual perspective, although its timeline could be adjusted where necessary.
Mr Oni Adedeji, Technical Assistant to the Acting Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, representing the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, said the initiative was consistent with the Federal Government’s broader efforts to reform assessment in the education sector.
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He charged the committee to develop standardised, fair and transparent assessment modalities capable of measuring candidates’ analytical, logical and verbal reasoning abilities beyond mere recall of subject content.
Alausa also said the committee would determine how the proposed components would be deployed, including whether they would be administered as a separate standardised examination or embedded within existing UTME subjects.
“I strongly believe getting these right will shape how Nigeria evaluates readiness for tertiary education now and in years to come,” he said.
Chairman of the committee, Prof Boniface Nworgu of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, said the effectiveness of UTME should ultimately be measured by its ability to identify candidates with the strongest prospects of succeeding in tertiary education.
He noted that JAMB conducts a selection examination rather than a certification examination, making the ability of UTME to predict academic success particularly important.
Nworgu said changes in tertiary education curricula, including the transition from Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (BMAS) to the Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS), had increased emphasis on skills and critical thinking. “The focus now is the area of skills and then critical thinking,” he said.
He added that the committee would consider other measures capable of improving the predictive validity of UTME if such measures emerged from its deliberations.
Nworgu also insisted that the proposed reform must be evidence-based, saying JAMB should be able to determine whether any modified examination was achieving its intended objectives.
“If we have been using UTME for this number of years and we want to produce a modified UTME, so to speak, there must be evidence at the end of the day that this effort was on time, that we did not waste the taxpayers’ money doing what is beneficial to the society,” he said.
The committee comprises representatives of universities, examination bodies, regulatory councils, secondary schools, students’ organisations and development agencies.
It is expected to submit its initial recommendations within four weeks, after which JAMB may engage assessment experts to develop the details of any framework adopted.
