JAMB plans to introduce life skills, critical thinking into UTME
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is considering plans to introduce life skills and critical thinking into the UTME to improve assessment Read More:…
The Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), administered by JAMB, has long served as the primary gateway for admission into Nigerian universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, with scores traditionally weighted heavily on recall of subject content. Critics, including educators and employers, have repeatedly argued that the exam's emphasis on rote memorisation does little to prepare or identify students for real-world problem-solving, fuelling periodic calls for reform of the test format and its role in the broader admissions process.
The newsrooms covering this story agree that JAMB is moving to incorporate critical thinking and life skills into the UTME, with the Registrar stressing that scores indicate a candidate's ranking relative to peers rather than a fixed measure of intelligence. ThisDay's report goes further, quoting the Registrar as saying candidates will no longer be assessed on textbook knowledge alone, suggesting a more significant shift in testing philosophy. However, none of the reports yet detail a timeline for implementation, how the new elements will be structured or scored, or whether this would require changes to the UTME syllabus used by schools nationwide.