The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has initiated a probe into alleged technical glitches during this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), amid public outcry over the mass failure of candidates.
To ensure a thorough investigation, JAMB has enlisted the services of vice chancellors, IT experts, and other stakeholders.
JAMB’s Public Communication Advisor, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, announced this in a statement yesterday in Abuja.
Over 1.5 million of the 1.9 million candidates who sat for this year’s UTME, which was conducted from April 24 to May 5, scored below 200 out of a possible 400 marks, prompting public outcry.
In the statement, titled: “Re: Public Complaint Regarding the Release of the 2025 UTME,” the board said it was expediting action on its annual system review, a comprehensive post-mortem of the examination process, typically conducted months after the exercise.
According to JAMB, the review will cover three key stages comprising registration, examination, and result release in the investigation.
The examination body said it was particularly concerned about unusual complaints from a few states, thereby currently scrutinising these issues in detail to identify and resolve any technical faults.
It said: “To assist in this process, we have engaged several experts, including members of the Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria, Chief External Examiners (who are heads of tertiary institutions), the Educational Assessment and Research Network in Africa, measurement experts, and vice chancellors from various institutions.
“If it is determined that there were indeed glitches, we will implement appropriate remedial measures promptly, as we do in the case of the examinations themselves.”
Also, thousands of candidates who scored below 200 in this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) organised by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) have petitioned the board’s registrar over the high failure rate in the examination.
The aggrieved candidates petitioned the JAMB registrar through their solicitors, John C. Nwobodo and M. C. Agbo, expressing misgivings over the results of the examination.
They argued that the results did not reflect their efforts, presupposing that there might have been possible glitches in the JAMB software which resulted in the mismatch between the questions and the answers.
The students claimed that the system might have been programmed in a way that candidates were only able to view their scores against each subject and the aggregate thereof.
The petition, which was copied to the Senate President, the Minister of Education and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, reads: “Moreover, the development has put your board on the spotlight that the need for accountability at this point and going forward becomes imperative and non-negotiable.
“We are solicitors to the 1,534,654 candidates who wrote the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination whose scores are below 200. They consist of 2,031 who scored below 100; 3,820 who scored between 100 and 119; 57,419 who scored between 120 and 139; 488,197 who scored between 140 and 159; and 983,187 who scored between 160 and 199. They shall hereafter be referred to as ‘our clients’.”
The lawyers urged JAMB to make full disclosure of the questions and the corresponding answers administered in respect of each candidate for easy self-evaluation, and to undertake a comprehensive review of the marking of the questions administered to ascertain that the correct answers were fixed against the questions. “If it is determined that there were indeed glitches, we will implement appropriate remedial measures promptly,” JAMB said.
