Five colours of UTME candidates

The Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) silently roared into my world in 2015. It penetrated my family as a difficult guest through my daughter. As she gathered momentum to wrestle with science subjects in the UTME aptitude tests, I felt guilty as I could do little to assist her. She chose to study the sciences, a chaotic terrain for me. However, my curiosity was stirred up when I looked at the contents of a few past questions that had become glued to her daily routines. One evening, I decided to share thirty minutes of my scarce time on the questions in the English Language section.

At a glance, a wave of shock swept through me. The questions veered off miles away from typical Ordinary Level English Language questions. Answers did not erupt from the texts; they did not stare one in the face from the multiple-choice options. They were hidden in critical thinking, logical reasoning, inferences, and literary devices. I feared that many graduates of the English Language could stumble and fall if asked to take the test. Since then, as I interacted with candidates for the UTME in the past decade, I noticed several categories of candidates who sit for the UTME examination, administered by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB).

Most RED candidates score 250 marks and above by immersing themselves in past questions

Few UTME candidates fall into the first category, which I would use colour code RED to tag, because these candidates are passionate, aggressive and energetic in their approach to the examination. They are the very few who knock their heads on iron walls to pull down the obstacles between them and spectacular scores in JAMB. Not precisely by acquiring critical thinking skills. Most RED candidates score 250 marks and above by immersing themselves in past questions and by supplicating to higher powers for the questions they practised to turn up in the examination hall. They would deny themselves sleep; memorise questions and answers; take the tests multiple times; fail, pass, pass and fail, clutching past questions in their armpit as they stumble from the reading table to their beds. They lose weight, burn the midnight oil, and force their parents to gulp a lot of guilt for their children who suffered in the brutal JAMB wrestling ring. Their above-average performance may not be due to mastery of critical thinking skills.

An illustration of a candidate preparing for the UTME examination

The second category of candidates, which I describe as YELLOW, has characteristics of blind optimism, cheerfulness, an unstable approach and even child-like disposition towards the examination. These are those who prepare for UTME but are trapped in the entertainment culture that makes hard work an unbearable burden. Their gods are smartphones and social media. They sink and are stuck in Tik-Tok videos that deliver hilarious clips, new fashion wears and styles, trending movies, and other content created by desperate characters who expect to acquire wealth through clickbait. The constant stream of notifications, updates, and engaging content on social media platforms is designed to capture and hold attention. This can lead to a decreased ability to focus on academic tasks that require sustained concentration, such as reading, studying, and attending lectures.

Their gods are smartphones and social media

Those distracted by such trends cannot devote the attention needed for critical thinking and success in UTME aptitude tests. Their minds are overloaded. Their brains are burdened with layers and clusters of unnecessary information.  Those who prepare for the UTME must have the presence of mind to understand and remember every detail about the topics in their subjects. There can, therefore, be no concord between JAMB and social media; each war against the other. Candidates cannot be servants to these two masters; they must focus on one and discard the other. Candidates who score low marks in UTME belong to this category. They possess the potential to excel, but they are dispossessed of success by social media.

Some candidates sit for the UTME on the platform of luck. Luck is a constant factor in life, but those who work hard stand a better chance of striking glittering scores.

The colour PURPLE describes the third category of candidates who sit for aptitude tests. They are generally magical and superstitious in thinking. They outsource success to God or some spiritual forces. I will illustrate this with a personal experience in my Primary Three. My class was very competitive, with an overdose of jealousy. Three pupils had monopolised the first three top positions in almost all subjects in our examinations. However, their performance was attributed to other forces, not hard work. To one, we believed his father was a witch doctor and had prepared and made him swallow a portion for brilliance. To the second person who was as tall as our teacher, we believed he had prior access to examination questions. His answers to questions were as exact as the teacher’s marking scheme. The only young lady among them had lived with her elder sister in Lagos before she returned to compete with us in our village primary school. We hated her city advantage.

An illustration of candidates sitting for the UTME Computer-Based Test

One day, a cousin walked up to me with a secret: our teacher, Mallam Abdullahi’s brilliance was linked to his forehead, he said. His forehead glowed like a mirror from excessive use of Vaseline. My cousin noticed that whenever Mallam Abdullahi wanted to remember anything, he would strike his forehead and the answer would emerge. Luckily, this discovery came when we were preparing for our promotional examination into Primary Four. We bought Vaseline and generously rubbed it on our foreheads. In the examination hall, we struck our foreheads with noisome confidence for answers to difficult questions. The outcome of the promotional examination was a disaster for us. We performed worse than we ever did in previous examinations. But that experience helped to prepare me for the future. I no longer repose confidence in luck for anything; I pray, but I work at every challenge. Some candidates sit for the UTME on the platform of luck. Luck is a constant factor in life, but those who work hard stand a better chance of striking glittering scores.

The phrase ‘boost scores’ left me perplexed when it struck my ears about JAMB examinations

The fourth category is those who sit for the examination as a formality. I allocate the colour PINK to characterise their attitude. They are soft, nonchalant, and playful because they do not feel the heat of the examination. Their hope is anchored on the capacity of their parents to boost their scores. The phrase ‘boost scores’ left me perplexed when it struck my ears about JAMB examinations. This is a crazy dimension to the disgraceful practice by parents, uncles, and elderly siblings who wrote or even hired experts to sit as surrogate candidates for their wards. It is a perfect way to obtain high scores in the UTME for spoiled candidates.

With technology and strict examination management, the authorities at JAMB have driven ghost writers out of the market. Through the confirmation of candidates’ biometrics as a precondition for uploading their details on the portal, it has become increasingly difficult for surrogate candidates to parade their dubious skills. However, civil servants familiar with JAMB’s technology could still perform miracles by sneaking into the backend of the JAMB portal to adjust candidates’ scores. This is not just criminal; it is brilliantly dangerous, because when the window’s glass is widely broken, the backend would become open to every bidder. The term ‘window’s glass’ is used in criminology to refer to insiders in organisations who facilitate criminal acts. If insiders in JAMB are not stopped, they will strip JAMB of its beauty and convert it into a worthless examination body.

Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the Registrar of the Joint Admission Matriculation Board (JAMB)

The fifth and last category of JAMB candidates is those I will tag as WHITE. They are confident, pure, innocent, but well-grounded for the examination hall. They have acquired the nuances of critical thinking, logical reasoning, reading between the lines, making inferences, and the capacity for speed and accuracy in responding to questions in their chosen subjects. They are a very lucky few who attended colleges like British-Nigerian or American-Nigerian International Schools. They engage in rigorous learning, equivalent to candidates who prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).  For these examinations, candidates are made to study materials in voluminous books, attend classes, watch audio-visual study materials, engage in group discussions, and conduct personal research into their subjects.

For these examinations, candidates are made to study materials in voluminous books, attend classes, watch audio-visual study materials, engage in group discussions, and conduct personal research into their subjects.

 
Year after year, candidates, parents, secondary schools, university administrators and JAMB officials lament shameful and woeful performances in the UTME aptitude tests. But little effort is made to prevent a repeat of the disappointments. The root cause of the poor performance is the near absence of deliberate preparation of candidates for JAMB. Secondary schools prepare candidates for achievement tests set by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO), but not for the rigorous aptitude tests set by JAMB. Achievement tests evaluate a candidate’s mastery of a particular curriculum or training, but aptitude tests go beyond such mastery. It focuses on critical thinking, reading between the lines, exactness in response to questions, speed and accuracy. It is often more general, assessing cognitive abilities like verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, logical thinking, spatial reasoning, and abstract problem-solving, rather than specific learned content. Achievement tests look backwards at what has been mastered, while aptitude tests look forward at potential capabilities.

Our secondary schools do not deliberately and adequately prepare their students for this all-important examination

Our secondary schools must devise an approach to equip students with these skills. Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning are introduced in junior primary schools. Their exercises often defeat many parents who attempt to help their wards answer the questions. The two approaches to reasoning are not taught in senior secondary schools. Every year, when poor JAMB results are released, we castigate JAMB for technical glitches, poor timing of examinations, hellish centres, bad computers, erratic electricity supply, and other causes of poor performance. But the main problem lies elsewhere. Our secondary schools do not deliberately and adequately prepare their students for this all-important examination. In developed societies, aptitude tests, the equivalent of the UTME, are taken more seriously by schools and parents than we do in Nigeria.
We must wake up.

Dr Tunji Alausa, Minister of Education