Following public outcry, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has admitted to errors in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results.
While taking responsibility for the lapses occasioned by some officers, the Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, begged all stakeholders to forgive the examination body.
This is sequel to JAMB admission that it had received an unusually high number of complaints regarding discrepancies in candidates’ scores.
Recall that out of 1.9 million candidates who sat for the UTME, over 1.5 million reportedly scored below 200 out of the maximum 400 marks.
Speaking Wednesday during a press briefing at JAMB headquarters in Bwari, a suburb of Abuja, Professor Oloyede said in the process of rectifying some of the issues identified in the course of the examination, the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider for Lagos and South-East zones inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers.
He said, regrettably, the oversight went undetected prior to the release of the results.
Explaining what went wrong, Oloyede said: “We appreciate all those who have lent their voices to the strident complaints on the results we released because you all did so out of concern. I appreciate our critics immensely because they could have chosen to be indifferent. I agree with the person who said that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it is indifference; the opposite of art is not ugliness, it is indifference; the opposite of faith is not heresy, it is indifference; and the opposite of life is not death, it is indifference. By not being indifferent to JAMB, we are grateful.
“Today marks a moment we shall not soon forget – a day that should have been filled with celebration for what was, until recently, regarded as our most successful UTME exercise. Regrettably, this joy has been overshadowed by an easily avoidable error by one or two persons.
“Without equivocation, there has been a lot of hoopla since the results of 2025 UTME were released last Friday, 9th May 2025. Despite the fact that JAMB is a responsive organisation, the unusual level of public concerns and loud complaints has prompted us to do an immediate audit or review of what happened, which we ordinarily would have done in June.
“I want to make it clear that our review and investigation reveal that there are grounds for the complaints about our 2025 UTME results and this press conference is convened with a view to unveiling the bitter truth of our findings openly and objectively.
“We are all human after all but before any other thing, it is imperative that I shed light on the extent that JAMB goes to ensure quality in its processes and activities.”
Speaking further, the JAMB boss said: “Quality assurance is cardinal to the operations of JAMB. I can assure you that we scale all heights, fathom all depths and traverse all horizons to ascertain that quality assurance mechanisms permeate all our operations from the take-off point to the finish line. We burn the midnight oil and we set our standards high. This is why we have guidelines, checklists and protocol guiding our activities right from the time of registration to the points of monitoring and supervision to the processing of results.
“As we know we cannot clap with our sole hand as a single entity, we have several committees in place that are part of our quality assurance system. There are Peace Monitors, of 41 women of substance who are or have been Principal Officers of Nigerian universities; we have Chief External Examiners (CEEs), who are Vice-Chancellors, Rectors and Provosts of universities, polytechnics and Colleges of Education.
“Each state also has Chief Technical Adviser, a reputable professor who is an expert in computing and cybersecurity. We have Peace Monitors, Civil Society Group, Equal Opportunity Group, the General Monitors Group, High-powered Opinion Leaders, the Roving Group, Technical Advisors Group and the Virtues Vanguards. All of these groups play critical roles and complement our staff in ensuring quality and troubleshooting challenges.
“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.”
…The glitches
Explaining the glitches, the organisation said: “After the mock examinations this year, we reviewed our LAG (which includes South West and South East 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. 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 call dummy, a simulation, a day before the examinations and everything seemed to be okay. In other words, we believed we were ready to deploy the items after some layers of testing the processes.
“However, 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.