Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has admitted that its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) has remained unchanged for over 30 years and may no longer be effective in selecting candidates for tertiary institutions.
The Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Segun Aina, made the admission on Wednesday in Abuja while inaugurating a committee of experts and stakeholders to overhaul the UTME with life skills and critical thinking components.
Aina said the board has been duplicating efforts by testing candidates purely on subject matters already covered by WAEC and NECO.
He explained that UTME candidates have already been assessed on subject expertise through their O-Level examinations, and what JAMB should be doing is ranking them based on skills needed to succeed 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,” the registrar said.
He questioned the continued validity of JAMB’s current assessment methods.
“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?” Aina asked.
According to him, the reform has become imperative as JAMB itself must interrogate whether its examination model is still relevant to the changing education environment.
“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.
Aina said the board deliberately assembled stakeholders from across the education ecosystem because it cannot be a judge in its own matter.
“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,” he said.
The committee has been given an initial four weeks to examine the proposal from a conceptual perspective, though the board says it will allow more time if needed.
“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,” Aina said.
The move received the backing of the Federal Government. The Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, represented by Mr. Oni Adedeji, said the reform is in line with government’s broader efforts to overhaul assessment in the education sector.
Alausa charged the committee to develop standardized, fair and transparent modalities that will measure analytical, logical and verbal reasoning beyond mere recall of content.
The committee’s Chairman, Prof. Boniface Nworgu of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, said JAMB conducts a selection examination, not a certificate examination, and its validity must be judged by how well it predicts success at tertiary level.
“What JAMB is expected to do and what it is doing is to look at those measures that can help us to select the candidates that have the highest promise of succeeding in academic tasks at the tertiary education level,” he said.
Nworgu noted that the transition from Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (BMAS) to Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) has shifted focus to skills and critical thinking, making JAMB’s reform understandable.
He promised that the committee would rely on evidence to ensure taxpayers’ money is not wasted.
“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 worth it,” he said.