It began with one skipped software patch. Within a few days, the results from 157 Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres were spitting out scrambled UTME scores, warping the futures of 380,000 students and sending three-quarters of Nigeria’s 1.95 million test-takers below the 200-point university cutoff.
By the time the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) acknowledged the error and ordered a retake, it was in the middle of its worst crisis in a decade, including a reported student’s suicide.
JAMB introduced CBT in 2013, phasing out paper-based tests entirely by 2015. The digitalisation signalled progress, yet a decade later, despite extensive investment, the platform still suffers from technical flaws. Students faced power failures, system crashes, and login errors in previous years, such as 2015, 2023, and 2024. But the 2025 crisis eclipsed them all.
After the results were released, showing that over 75% of the 1.95 million candidates scored below 200 out of 400—the typical benchmark for university admissions—public outrage followed.
Alex Onyia, founder of Educare, who petitioned JAMB on behalf of the candidates, said concerns surfaced on May 9, 2025, when JAMB released the UTME results. Principals from schools using the Educare learning platform noticed alarming discrepancies. Over the years, Educare, a software company that provides school management solutions, has developed a reliable performance prediction model based on students’ learning metrics. But this time, the gap between predicted and actual scores was vast, prompting immediate concern.
“We reached out to the most affected students, and their stories were consistent,” Onyia explained. “They faced technical challenges and were confident the scores didn’t reflect their performance. A major issue was transparency—unlike our CBT platform, JAMB’s system offered little clarity, making it impossible to explain the failure.”
While Onyia and his team fielded panicked calls from students and parents, tragedy struck in Lagos. Timilehin Faith Opesusi, a 19-year-old aspiring Microbiology student living with her sister in the Odogunyan area of Ikorodu, reportedly took her life by ingesting rodent poison after scoring 190, far below her expectations.
In response to the growing outcry, JAMB convened a high-level technical review on May 14, led by Registrar Professor Ishaq Oloyede and attended by technology experts, including Onyia. The review revealed three major upgrades had been implemented in 2025: a shift from count-based (one mark per correct answer) to source-based scoring, full randomisation of questions and answers to prevent cheating, and new performance patches to reduce lag. Critically, these updates were not uniformly deployed across all CBT centres.
“The engineering team didn’t follow their internal testing procedures; if they had, this shouldn’t have happened,” Onyia explained. A critical oversight was discovered: while the new patch had been deployed to servers in Kaduna, it was not applied to the Lagos cluster, which also served the South-East. As a result, 157 centres—92 in the South-East and 65 in South-West Lagos—were using outdated server logic that misinterpreted shuffled questions, affecting nearly 380,000 candidates.
“The error went undetected until after the 17th session. By then, thousands of scores had been generated using flawed algorithms,” Onyia said.
Beyond the software error, structural issues in JAMB’s CBT network design have also been raised. Each region is supposed to be served by a dedicated server cluster. However, the South-East had no such infrastructure and instead relied on the Lagos cluster, over 450km away. In practice, CBT centres are supposed to function within local area networks (LANs) for speed and stability. Running dozens of centres remotely without high-speed, redundant connections introduces risks of latency and failure, exactly what happened.
According to James Nnanyelugo, Educare’s lead engineer who participated in the technical audit, the core issue was not just physical distance, but the failure to properly synchronise system updates within the LAG cluster.
“The real failure was in system discipline,” he said. “ We learned that a staff member had previously refused to push an update early enough, only choosing to push them when it was already late. If you are conducting an exam of this size, you need to start early to push an update, so you can stress-test it against any possible risk. But in this case, it was too late—the patch never reached the LAG servers before the exams began.”.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, JAMB publicly acknowledged the failure. Professor Oloyede apologised at a national press briefing and announced that all affected candidates would retake the exam at no cost between May 16 and 19. The new schedule was carefully coordinated with the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) to avoid overlap with ongoing Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE) exams. For students who complained of difficulty in obtaining tickets that will enable them to access the hall, Fabian Benjamin, Public Relations Officer (PRO) of JAMB, said the admissions board is directly operating the ticketing system to ensure that all affected students get their tickets.
“This mistake is directly from JAMB, so we are closely monitoring to ensure no student is left out,” Benjamin said. However, he ruled out any possibility of remarking the answer scripts of the affected despite admitting JAMB could still retrieve them.
The 2025 incident illustrates the perils of partial deployment in high-stakes digital systems. While JAMB has invested heavily in CBT infrastructure—including a ₦2.7 billion budget for 2024 alone—gaps in execution continue to expose students to failure. Until JAMB fully decentralises its server infrastructure, strengthens its testing protocols, and implements real-time monitoring, the credibility of its digital assessment model will remain vulnerable.
Education experts argue that the CBT model remains the future of standardised testing in Nigeria. Yet, without rigorous quality controls and disciplined systems management, even the best-funded innovations risk becoming expensive failures. Without thorough quality control, disciplined systems management, and a commitment to equitable digital access, innovation alone is not enough.
