The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that over 300,000 candidates from 157 examination centers will retake the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) following technical errors that affected the processing of their results.

In a press conference held at JAMB's headquarters in Bwari, Abuja on Wednesday, Registrar Is-haq Oloyede admitted that technical failures by service providers had compromised the integrity of results for candidates who took the examination in Lagos and the South-Eastern states.

"In the process of rectifying an issue, the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers," Oloyede explained. "Regrettably, this oversight went undetected prior to the release of the results."

The error affected 65 centers (206,610 candidates) in Lagos and 92 centers (173,387 candidates) in the Owerri zone, which includes South-Eastern states.

Retests to Begin Immediately

The rescheduled examinations will begin on Friday, May 16, with JAMB contacting affected candidates through text messages, emails, and phone calls. Candidates are directed to reprint their examination slips for the new dates.

JAMB has coordinated with the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) to avoid timetable clashes for candidates currently taking their Senior School Certificate Examinations.

"Any candidate with a clash of timetable, particularly for Agricultural Science on Friday, would be rescheduled," Oloyede said, adding that most potentially affected candidates have been scheduled for Saturday.

System Failure Despite Quality Assurance Measures

The registrar described the incident as "an easily avoidable error by one or two persons" that overshadowed what should have been "our most successful UTME exercise."

Despite JAMB's extensive quality assurance mechanisms, which include numerous committees, in-house technical experts, and simulation testing, the error occurred during a patch update implemented after an initial issue was detected on April 25.

Oloyede emphasized that the problem was neither a glitch nor sabotage, but rather a failure by one service provider to properly upload patches to center servers during the first three to four days of the examination.

Top Officials and Experts Called In

Following widespread complaints after results were released on May 9, JAMB convened emergency meetings with education experts, stakeholders, and officials, including:

- Boniface Nworgu, an expert in psychometrics from Imo State

- Adenike Osofisan, a technical advisor from the Computer Professionals Council of Nigeria (CPN)

- Kabiru Isyaku, president of the Nigerian Academy of Education

- Representatives from parent-teacher associations and student organizations

- Chief External Examiners from the affected states

Former Aviation Minister Osita Chidoka from the Athena Centre also participated in reviewing candidate responses.

Registrar Takes Responsibility

Oloyede took personal responsibility for the failure, stating: "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."

He described the incident as "a significant setback for the Board's reputation" while affirming JAMB's commitment to transparency, fairness, and equity.

The registrar noted that outside the affected centers, the examination results followed normal patterns, with the highest score in 2025 (374) being the best in the last one-and-a-half decades, though overall performance was "sadly poorer than that of last year."

JAMB has pledged that all affected candidates will be given the opportunity to retake their examinations under fair conditions.