The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has ordered a re-sit for over 380,000 candidates of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) after confirming that server glitches have compromised exam integrity in multiple centres across Lagos and the South-East region, including Owerri.
Professor Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB Registrar, confirmed the re-examination today in Abuja, while stating that the Board is fast-tracking its post-examination audit in response to widespread complaints over this year’s UTME results, released Friday, May 10.
“We are identifying the affected centres and rescheduling the examinations,” Professor Oloyede tells journalists. “The integrity of the UTME process is non-negotiable, and any technical errors capable of distorting candidates’ performance metrics are unacceptable.”
According to him, “we have decided that all the candidates affected in the 157 centres out of 882 centres will be contacted to retake their examinations starting from Friday, May 16, 2025. These candidates are to be contacted through text messages addressed to their registered phone numbers, their email addresses, their profiles and phone calls by JAMB. They are directed to reprint their Examination Slips for the rescheduled examination dates.
JAMB: Widespread outcry and result anomalies
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has ordered a re-sit for over 380,000 candidates of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) after confirming that server glitches have compromised exam integrity in multiple centres across Lagos and the South-East region, including Owerri.
Professor Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB Registrar, confirmed the re-examination today in Abuja, while stating that the Board is fast-tracking its post-examination audit in response to widespread complaints over this year’s UTME results, released Friday, May 10.
“We are identifying the affected centres and rescheduling the examinations,” Professor Oloyede tells journalists. “The integrity of the UTME process is non-negotiable, and any technical errors capable of distorting candidates’ performance metrics are unacceptable.”
Widespread outcry and result anomalies
This year’s UTME, taken by over 1.94 million candidates from April 19 to April 29, is attracting significant public outcry, with many students and parents reporting mass failure, missing results, and other irregularities.
The Registrar attributes the mass anomalies to what he describes as a “server failure in one of our service providers”, which he says has affected about 24 Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres in Lagos and Owerri zones. Affected candidates, Oloyede says, will be notified via SMS and JAMB’s portal of new dates for the re-sit.
He also announces that the Board is cancelling results of 64 centres over confirmed malpractice and other technical issues, while another 18 centres are under investigation.
Technology-driven testing hit by infrastructure gaps
JAMB, which is pioneering tech-driven assessment reforms across Nigeria’s education sector, has migrated UTME delivery fully to a CBT model since 2013. However, the latest incident is underscoring persistent infrastructure challenges plaguing high-stakes digital testing in the country.
JAMB’s technical team is working with its infrastructure partners to isolate the affected servers and implement fail-safe protocols to prevent future recurrence, the Registrar assures.
“We are committed to fairness. Candidates who are affected by no fault of theirs are not losing out,” Oloyede says.
What was the technical issue that led to the problems with the 2025 UTME results?
According to the JAMB chief, the technical issue occurred in the “LAG” operational category, which includes certain Southern and Northern states. Following a review after mock examinations, JAMB realized that options for test items were not shuffled in the LAG category and insisted on this being corrected.
While initial testing and simulations seemed successful, on the second day of the actual examination (April 25, 2025), an omission was discovered in the items within the LAG category. An update was made to correct and grade these items, but in the process of re-uploading responses, the service provider for LAG inadvertently failed to properly update delivery servers in some centers. This resulted in patch errors in certain servers for the first few days of the examination in two locations: Lagos zone (65 centers) and Owerri zone (92 centers), affecting a significant number of candidates.
“In simple terms,” Professor Oloyede says, “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.”
Next steps for affected candidates
Candidates whose centres are under review or scheduled for the re-sit are advised to check the JAMB portal or their registered phone numbers for real-time updates. JAMB is also setting up dedicated support desks in zonal offices to handle individual complaints.
According to him, “we have decided that all the candidates affected in the 157 centres out of 882 centres will be contacted to retake their examinations starting from Friday, May 16, 2025. These candidates are to be contacted through text messages addressed to their registered phone numbers, their email addresses, their profiles and phone calls by JAMB. They are directed to 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 endeavored to ensure that no such exist. 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.”
Meanwhile, Professor Oloyede says the Board is collaborating with security agencies to prosecute individuals or centres found guilty of aiding examination fraud or sabotaging JAMB’s systems.
Home
