As UTME Faces Tinubu’s Reforms

Monday Column By Bagudu Mohammed

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Recently, the Minister of State for Education, Prof. Suwaiba Said Ahmad, convened a stakeholders’ meeting where a short video went viral. In it, she declared: “We got Cs in O-levels but our children are getting As because of malpractice.” The statement resonated with frustrated parents and teachers.

Yet, for all its moral force, it is only half the story, and half-truths can be dangerous in education reform.

The deeper problem is not simply that students cheat to obtain As. It is that many can obtain excellent grades without truly understanding what they have studied. A student may memorise a handout, reproduce an abstract definition perfectly and earn an A without being able to explain or apply the idea. To blame everything on “expo” and malpractice is therefore an elegant oversimplification. It allows us to avoid confronting another accomplice: an assessment architecture that often rewards cramming over cognition.

Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives distinguishes remembering from higher-order skills such as understanding, applying, analysing and creating. Our system often remains trapped at the bottom of that pyramid. Similarly, philosopher Gilbert Ryle distinguished between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” This helps explain why some graduates struggle in the workplace: the problem is not always malpractice but a system that certifies content without adequately testing competence, aptitude and the ability to defend or apply an idea.

There is another half-truth in suggesting that grade inflation is confined to primary and secondary education. Nigerian universities have also witnessed striking increases in First Class graduates, including departments producing unusually large numbers and the emergence of perfect CGPAs. But here again, shouting “malpractice” may obscure a more complicated reality.

The University of Ibadan’s Law programme recently attracted attention when 58 of 146 graduates earned First Class in 2024/25, about 40 percent. Former Vice-Chancellor Prof. Idowu Olayinka defended the outcome by pointing to the strength of the intake, whose average weighted UTME/Post-UTME score was about 70 percent, with the Law cut-off at 70.875 in 2025/26. A strong cohort, he argued, can legitimately produce a strong graduating class.

UNILAG’s Mass Communication similarly produced 18 First Class graduates in 2023/24. Its Head of Department, Sunday Oloruntola, attributed this partly to deliberate academic targeting from Year One, competence-driven assignments and a transformed learning environment in which textbooks, journals, global lectures and AI tools are readily accessible.

The wider picture matters. UNILAG produced 340 First Class graduates among about 10,000 students at its 54th convocation in 2024 and 617 at its 56th in 2026. Numbers can sound alarming without denominators: 20 First Class graduates in a class of 500 is 4 percent; 20 in a class of 50 is 40 percent.

Historical evidence also shows that the phenomenon is neither new nor uniform. The University of Maiduguri produced only 25 First Class graduates in its first 20 years, from 1978 to 1998, but 172 in the five years from 2009 to 2015. Conversely, some departments have gone decades without one. OAU English produced its first First Class in 21 years in 2018, while LASU History and International Studies produced its first in 40 years in 2024.

When the former ASUU President Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke questioned the rising number of First Class degrees in private universities in 2024, private university leaders cited better learning environments and cohort effects, with Dominion University, for example, producing 35 First Class graduates across two broad academic divisions.

The lesson is captured by educational measurement scholar Samuel Messick’s theory of validity: an assessment is not valid merely because it produces impressive scores; it must measure what it claims to measure. First Class in Nigeria is defined by a CGPA threshold of 4.5, not by a quota requiring rarity. If 40 students genuinely meet the threshold, all 40 qualify.

Stronger admission cohorts, better access to knowledge, improved continuous assessment and students deliberately organising their academic lives around excellence can therefore produce clusters of First Class graduates without necessarily proving that standards have collapsed. The real question is whether the requirements remain rigorous, genuinely earned and comparable.

It is against this complicated backdrop that JAMB is preparing to reform the UTME. The new Registrar, Prof. Segun Aina, inaugurated a committee on September 17 with a mandate to introduce life skills and critical thinking into the examination.

His argument is compelling: the current subject-based UTME substantially duplicates WAEC and NECO. If school-leaving examinations have already tested Chemistry, Government, Literature and other subjects, should UTME continue to retest essentially the same knowledge? More importantly, does such testing adequately predict who will succeed at university?

International practice increasingly separates subject mastery from aptitude. The SAT has shifted towards reasoning; India’s CUET includes comprehension, data interpretation and logical reasoning; the UK uses A-Levels as subject evidence while examinations such as LNAT test reasoning for law; and South Africa uses National Benchmark Tests for academic and quantitative literacy.

Nigeria could therefore consider several models.

One is a General Scholastic Aptitude test covering verbal reasoning, comprehension, argument evaluation, quantitative reasoning, data interpretation and logical reasoning, alongside civic and current-affairs literacy.

Another is a Situational Judgement and Life Skills component, presenting candidates with realistic scenarios involving ethical dilemmas, group conflicts, misinformation and financial decisions. Such questions can assess judgement, collaboration and problem-solving rather than memorised answers.

A third, perhaps more adaptable to Nigeria, is a hybrid model: WAEC/NECO could account for 50–60 percent as evidence of subject mastery, the new UTME aptitude component 30–40 percent, with the remainder covering digital literacy and communication.JAMB could also develop adaptive tracks for STEM, Arts and Social Sciences, and Education and Vocational pathways, testing domain-relevant aptitude rather than duplicating the entire secondary-school curriculum.

This is the philosophical shift at the heart of the proposed reform: from asking how much a candidate has memorised to asking whether the candidate possesses the reasoning, literacy, numeracy and problem-solving capacity required to survive and thrive in tertiary education.But Nigeria must guard against the familiar “Nigerian factor”, the tendency for promising reforms to become vulnerable to compromise. A new system that becomes easier to manipulate, more opaque or less rigorous would defeat its purpose.

The committee’s four-week assignment should therefore not be to create another WAEC. It should create something closer to a Nigerian SAT: concise, difficult to game, resistant to cramming and focused on how a candidate thinks rather than simply what the candidate remembers.

President Tinubu, Minister Alausa and Prof. Aina have an opportunity to reshape the gateway into Nigerian higher education. The reform must strengthen, rather than further weaken, the credibility of our educational system. Its success should ultimately be judged not by how revolutionary it sounds, but by whether it produces a fairer, more secure and more valid measure of university readiness.