JAMB Shifts UTME to Critical Thinking

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has begun a fundamental overhaul of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), declaring its largely subject-based format outdated after more than three decades and questioning its effectiveness in identifying candidates likely to succeed in tertiary institutions.

JAMB Registrar, Prof. Segun Aina, said the proposed reform would shift the examination beyond testing candidates' knowledge of school subjects to assessing critical thinking, reasoning, problem-solving and other life skills. Aina spoke on Wednesday in Abuja at the inauguration of a committee of education experts and stakeholders mandated to develop a framework for integrating the new competencies into UTME.

He argued that candidates sitting UTME had already demonstrated subject knowledge through O-Level examinations conducted by bodies such as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and National Examinations Council (NECO), while JAMB's primary responsibility was to rank them for admission. "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," he said. The Registrar said the review would examine whether the examination, in its current form, remained capable of predicting which candidates were best prepared for universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. "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 JAMB deliberately constituted a broad-based committee because the board should not unilaterally determine the future structure of an examination affecting millions of candidates and tertiary institutions. "We cannot be judges in our own matter," he said, adding that the committee would ensure that any proposed changes commanded broad stakeholder acceptance. The committee has four weeks initially to examine the proposal and recommend a framework, although Aina said the timeline could be adjusted if necessary.

Representing the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, Technical Assistant to the Acting Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Oni Adedeji, said the initiative aligned with the Federal Government's wider reforms of educational assessment. He charged the committee to develop standardised, fair and transparent methods for measuring candidates' analytical, logical and verbal reasoning abilities beyond recall of subject content.

The committee is also expected to determine whether the proposed competencies should constitute a separate standardised test or be incorporated into existing UTME subjects. "I strongly believe getting these right will shape how Nigeria evaluates readiness for tertiary education now and in years to come," Alausa said.

Committee Chairman, Prof. Boniface Nworgu of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, said UTME's effectiveness should ultimately be judged by how accurately it identifies candidates with the greatest prospects of succeeding in tertiary education. He stressed that UTME was a selection rather than certification examination, making its ability to predict candidates' academic performance 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 placed greater emphasis on skills and critical thinking. "The focus now is the area of skills and then critical thinking," he said. He said the committee would consider other measures capable of improving UTME's predictive value, but insisted that any changes must be supported by evidence. "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," Nworgu said.

The overhaul represents a significant shift in Nigeria's approach to tertiary admissions, moving away from a model that has remained largely unchanged since the 1990s. For millions of candidates who sit the UTME annually, the reform promises an examination that assesses not just what they know, but how they think ,a change that could redefine the pathway to higher education in Africa's most populous nation.