[OPINION]: Lessons For UTME Candidates

As last year, the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results were released and it recorded mass failure which caught the attention of the public for what’s the problem for the failure.

The alarming rise of social media influence was seen as what plunged the learning habits of young people into abysmal decline thus resulting in national failure. Other critics however blamed the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) for their inadequate preparation. They gave an example with the internet service glitch that was reported in some Computer Based Test (CBT) centres.

After my brother’s successful UTME registration, I went over the syllabus captured in a CD given to them to plan how best I could assist him. But what I realised going through the syllabus left me stunned. No stone was left unturned as far as the senior secondary school syllabus was concerned. Considering that the elaborated UTME syllabus means that there are no “areas of concentration” of any particular subject of combination, the area of focus covers all the topics right from SS1 to SS3.

The JAMB outlined all the topics under each subject; each topic was furnished with what the candidate is expected to learn, and interestingly several related references were provided.

Apart from the bulkiness of the UTME syllabus, another aspect the candidates need to prepare for is the technicalities of JAMB questions.

Even though there are about four months until the exams; to avoid cutting grass for a dog, I chose just two subjects to help my brother with – Chemistry and Mathematics. After a topic is covered, he would solve all the exercises under the topic treated. But to my chagrin, because of the technicality involved in JAMB questions, the majority of the past questions would appear beyond his reach. This means that even if a question came from a topic studied it does not guarantee scoring it. The question would beg students to employ a thinking cap. I will later explain further.

UTME is a selection process so the rationale behind its technicality. In his chat on NTA’s “Weekend File”, Professor Ishaq Oloyede explained that the UTME is meant to be a “selection process”. So coupled with the fact that the number of applicants has been way more than the capacity of Nigerian universities, it makes the model even necessary.

So even if the UTME questions become less tough, the consequences are that the usual 180-200 cut-off mark will be elevated to say 220-240. Therefore, the situation is brought back to the very beginning.

READ ALSO:JAMB should be blamed for 2021 UTME mass failure – Tutorial Operators

But the understanding of how UTME works and adequate (general and technical) preparation ahead of the exam are the keys to passing the exam.

Early preparation entails acquiring general knowledge by studying all senior school syllabus at least a year ahead of the UTME. If a student would learn, for instance, quadratic equation in Mathematics, he should be able to employ the four different methods, namely, factorization, completing the square, formula, or by the graph to solve quadratic equations.

But to ensure answering any question that comes from quadratic equations, after acquiring the general knowledge, students should be at home with means to solve the quadratic equations. Consider this question: “The three sides of a right triangle form three consecutive even numbers. Find the lengths of the three sides.“

This problem is the same thing as the previous quadratic equation but as you can see students’ knowledge of methods of solving quadratic equations is not useful without the skills to extract the information to form the quadratic equation.

In order words, the student has to have the ability to express an unknown consecutive even number, take example x to be the unknown even number, then the other consecutive even numbers to make up the sides of the triangle in the question must be x+2, and x+4.

Moreover, the student must know the Pythagoras theorem, that is, the square of x+4 is equal to the addition of squares of x and x+2. So, the question didn’t beg the student for his knowledge of quadratic equations only but at least the other two topics. In this way, three topics were covered by JAMB to ask just one question.

Another peculiar thing with the UTME exam technicality is that sometimes it is not solving the question that is the problem but the form in which the answer is presented. A student may successfully solve a particular question but end up not scoring it. For instance, a final answer of 0.0186 can be written as 1.86*10-2 in a standard form or 0.02 in two decimal places or 0.019 in two significant figures.

So, a student with 0.0186 at hand as a final answer might be left flabbergasted not seeing his solution among the options and therefore end up bowing out to the JAMB technicalities. These are the JAMB trademark in dribbling their clients.

The UTME is a survival of the fittest, so to be among them, the candidate must keep in mind that the preparation is far beyond general knowledge. The candidate must have the ability to answer questions technically. This is achieved after making early preparation from at least a year to UTME, revising the overall secondary school syllabus, and during months to the exam engage with their past questions to improve on in-depth problem-solving skills.

Bilyamin Abdulmumin is a PhD candidate, he studied Chemical Engineering at ABU Zaria.

READ ALSO:Mass failure: Out of 1.13m, 961,387 candidates fail to score at least 200 in JAMB UTME

CREDIT: ALLSCHOOL, Daily Trust