The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, has begun a major review of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, with plans to introduce life skills and critical thinking into the nation’s tertiary admission test.
The proposed reform could change how candidates seeking admission into universities, polytechnics and colleges of education are assessed, with greater emphasis on their ability to think, reason and apply knowledge to real-life situations.
JAMB Registrar, Prof. Segun Aina, disclosed this on Tuesday in Abuja while inaugurating a committee of education stakeholders and experts mandated to develop a framework for integrating life skills and critical thinking into the UTME.
Aina said the review had become necessary because UTME was primarily designed to rank candidates who had obtained their O-Level qualifications and should, therefore, avoid merely repeating the subject-based assessments conducted by examination bodies such as the West African Examinations Council, WAEC, and the National Examinations Council, NECO.
He said candidates had already demonstrated their subject knowledge through their secondary school examinations, making it necessary for JAMB to examine whether the UTME could better assess the skills required for success in tertiary education.
“So ours is a ranking task. It’s not necessarily to test your subject matter expertise. So we feel for the UTME examination to be purely subject matter is a duplicity of effort of sorts,” Aina said.
The registrar challenged the committee to determine whether the existing UTME methodology was still capable of accurately predicting candidates’ prospects of success at the tertiary level.
“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 noted that the basic UTME format had remained largely unchanged for more than three decades, stressing that changing demands in the education system made periodic review necessary.
“The biggest room in the house is the room for improvement. So we want the committee to help us take a look at this,” he said.
He said JAMB deliberately assembled experts and representatives from across the education sector to ensure that the proposed reform reflected broad stakeholder input.
“We cannot be judges in our own matter. So we have assembled a team of stakeholders who are also experts in their own rights to join us in taking a look at this issue, to guide us and to make sure that any decision we take is one that is broadly acceptable to all the stakeholders who will be affected by these decisions,” Aina said.
The committee has been given an initial four weeks to examine the proposal from a conceptual perspective, although the registrar said its tenure could be extended where necessary.
“We will respond to the requests of the committee as they see fit, within reason. But they’ve been given an initial time of four weeks to look into this,” he said.
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