The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has finally confirmed the reason behind the unusually poor performance in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME): a major system glitch affecting hundreds of thousands of candidates.
This admission comes after weeks of public outcry and independent reviews, especially from Educare, that questioned the credibility of the results. Now, JAMB is taking corrective steps by mandating a retake for affected candidates starting May 16.
Recommended: Study JAMB Past Questions & Answers for Free
What Went Wrong with the 2025 UTME?
A Failed Attempt to Upgrade Exam Security
According to JAMB's technical report, the glitch began when they introduced new measures to reduce malpractice:
- Full shuffling of both questions and answer options.
- A new validation model for grading answers (source-based rather than count-based).
- System-wide optimizations to reduce lag during exams.
However, these changes were only partially deployed. While the Kaduna (KAD) server was updated with the required patch, the Lagos (LAG) server—used in Lagos and the South-East—was not fully patched.
As a result:
- Some CBT centers did not receive the complete exam content.
- Questions weren't properly shuffled or marked.
- Candidates' answers were not fully submitted or correctly graded.
This technical failure went unnoticed until the second day of the UTME (April 25), despite similar issues being observed during mock exams in early April.
Who Was Affected?
JAMB confirmed that this glitch affected:
- 92 centres in the South-East
- 65 centres in Lagos
- Including candidates in Oyo State
That's 157 out of 882 centres nationwide, affecting:
- 206,610 candidates in Lagos
- 173,387 in the South-East and Oyo
- Total: Over 379,000 candidates
Importantly, the North was not affected, as its servers had the latest software patches.
Recommended: Practice JAMB CBT
Why Students and Schools Raised Concerns
The first red flag came from school principals using the Educare CBT platform, who noticed a sharp deviation between their students' practice scores and their UTME results.
According to Alex Onyia, founder of Educare, thousands of students who had consistently performed well during practice were now scoring unusually low marks—many in suspicious patterns like 143, 157, 161, etc. This suggested a systemic failure, not individual poor performance.
Further investigation by Educare across 15,000+ candidates supported these claims, and the technical review conducted with JAMB validated the same findings.
“This shows the importance of transparency,” Onyia said. “If Educare can release full results in seconds, there's no reason JAMB should keep candidates in the dark with just a score and no mark sheet.”
What JAMB Is Doing Now
Affected Candidates Will Retake the Exam
In response, JAMB has:
- Acknowledged its fault and apologized for the failure.
- Announced that affected candidates will retake the UTME from May 16.
- Declined the option to remark scripts, stating that the faulty systems didn't store all candidates' answers, making regrading impossible.
Although many Nigerians believe the affected students should not bear the burden of retaking the exams, JAMB insists it's the only viable option given the technical limitations.
What to Do Next
If you're a candidate who wrote the 2025 UTME in Lagos, South-East, or Oyo State, and received a suspiciously low score:
- Check your centre's status to know if it was affected.
- Prepare for a retake starting May 16—details should be released soon by JAMB.
- Stay updated for official announcements and exam guides.
The 2025 UTME glitch has raised serious concerns about transparency and reliability in Nigeria's examination system. While JAMB's prompt response is commendable, this event shows the urgent need for modern, well-tested systems and accountability, especially when students' futures are at stake.
Resources: @winexviv, @TrendingEx
