The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is considering plans to introduce life skills and critical thinking into the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) as part of efforts to broaden how candidates are assessed for admission into tertiary institutions.
JAMB Registrar, Professor Segun Aina, disclosed this on Wednesday during the Good Morning Nigeria programme on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), saying the proposed reforms would assess candidates beyond their knowledge of conventional academic subjects.
According to Aina, the initiative is part of a broader review of the examination framework aimed at making the UTME more relevant to the skills students need to succeed in higher education.
A committee comprising education stakeholders and experts has been established to develop recommendations on how the proposed competencies could be assessed. The committee will also determine whether life skills and critical thinking should be introduced as separate components or integrated into existing UTME subjects.
Aina also clarified that a candidate’s UTME score should not be interpreted solely as a measure of academic knowledge, explaining that the examination is primarily designed to rank candidates relative to their peers.
“It is not how good you are that your JAMB score speaks to. It is more about how you rank against others,” he said.
He explained that the significance of a particular score depends partly on the overall performance of candidates in a given examination year.
“If you are in a cohort of JAMB candidates where everybody scores above 300, then 299 will suddenly start to look like a very low score. So, we must put this thing in proper perspective,” the registrar said.
