The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) said it is considering the introduction of life skills and critical thinking into the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) as part of efforts to improve the assessment of candidates seeking admission into tertiary institutions.
The Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Segun Aina, disclosed this on Wednesday during the Good Morning Nigeria programme on the Nigerian Television Authority.
He said the proposed reforms would assess candidates beyond their knowledge of academic subjects.
Aina said the UTME score should not be interpreted solely as a measure of a candidate’s knowledge but as a ranking of performance relative to other candidates in the same examination cycle.
“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 interpretation of scores depended partly on the overall performance of candidates in a particular 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.
On the proposed reforms, Aina said the board was exploring ways to incorporate critical thinking and life skills into the examination to make its assessment more relevant to the demands of higher education.
He said a committee comprising education stakeholders and experts had been established to develop recommendations on how the competencies could be assessed.
The committee is expected to consider whether the skills should be introduced as separate components or integrated into existing UTME subjects.
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