From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), broke down in tears on Wednesday as he openly admitted that undetected “technical glitches” affected the credibility of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) vis-à-vis the results that were released last Friday.
At a press conference in Abuja, Oloyede said that JAMB prepared adequately for the 2025 exercise, and had even conducted mock-UTME to test the preparedness of its systems, but unfortunately, the exercise ended in disappointment due to some sabotage efforts by some of its staff and service providers.
He insisted that the 2025 UTME could have been the finest for the Board if not for the carelessness, negligence, and lack of concern exhibited by the agents entrusted with a crucial yet straightforward function.
He explained: “Before the 2025 examination, our technical officers were made to take tests, and successful ones were deployed to the field for the exercise.
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“All the participating officials are thoroughly profiled with their NINs to ensure efficiency and accountability. We also deployed a robust team of in-house electronic testing experts led by a renowned professor of software engineering.
“In the 2025 exercise, we deployed our systems to the use of high-profile organisations within and outside Nigeria as part of the broader strategy of ensuring that everything works well.
“As part of our preparations for this year, we upgraded our systems from form-based to the single-item-based examination, which is the international standard.
“We simulated this system, streamlined our Autobot and Autotest systems, and still went ahead to develop our own JAMBTEST, a software innovated in-house by a small team led by own staff, Dubem.
“We improved on the examination system, simulated everything end-to-end before the examinations, and we thought everything was perfect. All the layers, including using dummies, were deployed this year, but despite that, an unexpected error happened. It is a classical manifestation of the axiom that man proposes, but God disposes.
“At this point, I will disclose part of how we operate in JAMB for the first time in public. Conscious of the fault lines of Nigeria, we use two operational ‘vehicles’ to traverse Nigeria under the code names of KAD and LAG. The KAD vehicle contains the Northern states excluding Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Niger, Kogi, and FCT, but it includes the six South South states.
“The LAG vehicle, on the other hand, consists of Southern states excluding the six South South states but includes Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Niger, Kogi, and FCT. These ‘vehicles’ are deployed to serve Nigerians as a whole, the South being part of the North and the North being part of the South. So, there is no distinct North or South.
“After the mock examinations this year, we reviewed our LAG ‘vehicle’, which includes South West and Southeast states as earlier indicated and KAD examination engines.
“We realised that in the LAG category, options to the items of our examinations were not shuffled. But we insisted that the shuffling must be effected. After this was done, we tested the update as usual, and we were satisfied.
“We, thereafter, still did what we called a simulation dummy, a day before the examinations, and everything seemed perfect. In other words, we thought we were ready to deploy the items after some layers of testing the processes.
“But on the second day of the examinations this year, which was Friday, April 25, 2025, we discovered that there was some omission in the items within the LAG category. An update for correction and grading adjustment was instantly made, and it was tested on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
“The update was applied after 12 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and it was successful. That was why all the examinations from Tuesday till the end of UTME had no problem.
“To correct and re-upload the responses (i.e., results) from LAG for the pre-Tuesday glitch, the service providers concerned with LAG were deployed to effect the patch, but there were patch errors in some centres (servers) for the first three or four days in only two locations.
“In simple terms, while 65 centres (206,610 candidates) were affected in Lagos zone (comprising only Lagos state), 92 centres (173,387 candidates) were affected in Owerri zone, which includes the South East states.
“In clear terms, in the process of rectifying the issue, the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider for LAG (Lagos and South-East zones) inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers.
“Regrettably, this oversight went undetected prior to the release of the results. But within 24 hours of rigorous work, we were able to isolate where the problem emanated from, in 65 centres in Lagos and 92 centres in the Owerri zone.
“In these centres, the patch was not properly applied in some centre-servers by the service provider, and that failure disrupted the upload of the candidates’ responses within the first three or four days, as applicable to Lagos and Owerri zones.
“Despite being able to identify the source of the problem and the affected centres, we are conscious of the painful damage it has inflicted on the reputation of JAMB.
“As Registrar of JAMB, I hold myself personally responsible, including for the negligence of the service provider, and I unreservedly apologise for it and the trauma that it has subjected affected Nigerians to, directly and indirectly.
“We remain committed to emerging stronger in our core values of transparency, fairness, and equity. It is our culture to admit error because we know that in spite of the best of our efforts, we are human, we are not perfect.
“The only consolation we have in this case is that it is just one of the two service providers that did not do well by uploading improperly.”
JAMB said it will contact all the candidates affected in the 157 centres out of 882 centres to retake their examinations starting from Friday, May 16, 2025.
“These candidates would be contacted through text messages addressed to their registered phone numbers, their email addresses, their profiles, and phone calls by JAMB.”
Oloyede asked that they reprint their examination slips for the rescheduled examination dates.
“While not oblivious of the fact that WAEC examinations are ongoing, we have contacted WAEC, and in an unprecedented show of solidarity, the Council has graciously decided to as much as possible accommodate us within the WAEC time-slot.
“Any candidate with a clash of timetable, particularly for Agricultural Science on Friday, would be rescheduled. However, we have endeavoured to ensure that no such exists.
“Most, if not all, such candidates are scheduled for Saturday. Fortunately, the prescribed texts for SSCE are also the prescribed texts for UTME, apart from the reading text of the UTME, which carries just 10 marks in our Use of English test.”
There was a national outrage a few days ago when JAMB disclosed that over 1.5 million out of the over two million candidates who participated in the 2025 UTME scored below the 200 average score.
The statistical analysis of the 2025 UTME result indicated that 4,756 candidates (0.24%) scored 320 and above; 7,658 candidates (0.39%) scored 300 to 319; 12,414 candidates (0.63%) scored 300 and above.
The data further indicated that 73,441 (3.76%) scored 250 to 299; 334,560 candidates (17.11%) candidates scored 200 to 249; 983,187 candidates (50.29%) scored 160 to 199; 488,197 candidates (24.97%) scored 140 to 159; 57, 417 candidates (2.94%) scored 120 to 139; while 3, 820 candidates (0.20%) scored 100 to 119.
Some parents and candidates openly rejected and disowned the UTME results, describing the exercise as a mere allocation of scores, and accused JAMB of systematically failing their children, some of whom the parents claimed are exceptionally brilliant, and had proven their brilliance in previous examinations.