The 2025 JAMB Technical Glitch

By Niyi Akinnaso

JAMB Registrar, Prof Is’ahq Oloyede

It was as if that was what detractors had been waiting for—the server glitch that affected the results of a small fraction of the 2025 UTME candidates, specifically in CBT centres in Lagos and Southeast states. The detractors included ethnic jingoists, cheaters, unreflective critics, and university autonomy advocates.

The criticisms came pouring in as soon as the results were released, showing a high failure rate in which nearly 78 percent of the candidates scored below the 50 percentile mark of 200 out of a total of 400 possible marks. It must be JAMB’s fault, they proclaimed. No one wanted to admit that JAMB had succeeded in cutting down on exam malpractices, by setting up CCTV cameras in CBT centres, by establishing various malpractice detection methods, and, above all, by eliminating so-called Miracle Centres, where standard exam protocols were suspended for a fee.

Moreover, critics overlooked the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational outcome: The majority of the UTME candidates this year were the high school students in JSS1 in September 2019, who missed school for two or more years because of the pandemic. The rough patches of their foundation years in secondary school could not but take a toll on their performance down the line.

The fierce debate over performance led to the revelation of a computer glitch, which affected about 380,000 out of a total of 1,955,069 candidates, who sat for the examinations. 206,610 of the affected candidates wrote their exams in Lagos, while the remaining 173,397 wrote theirs across the five states of the Southeast. At the height of the outcry against mediocre performance, JAMB Registrar, Professor Is’ahq Oloyede, quickly advanced JAMB’s usual post-test review, detected the error, and summoned a press conference to reveal the findings. In the process. Oloyede took responsibility, apologised, and even chocked on the apology. Besides, he offered immediate remedies, including the retake of the exams by the affected candidates.

Regrettably, some critics still lost their bearing completely. Some professors, legislators, and armchair pundits from the Southeast ethnicised the problem, by claiming that the Yoruba Registrar, was motivated by ethnic considerations. A Professor specifically claimed that the Igbo in the Southeast and Lagos were the target of his mischief.

A respected columnist ignored Oloyede’s apology, by claiming that Oloyede had put the blame on God. The columnist merely parsed the title of JAMB’s post on X, which reads “Man proposes, God disposes.” It was an unfortunate heading because it is subject to variable interpretations. The said columnist opted for the literal meaning. However, as an English proverb, it basically means that even the best-laid plans can fail.

In this particular case, Oloyede went to great lengths in explaining how human error, not God, caused the glitch: “A major operational flaw was uncovered during the implementation phase (of changes introduced to promote system efficiency). The system patch necessary to support both shuffling and source-based validation … was not applied to the LAG (Lagos) cluster, which services centres in Lagos and the South-East … As a result, 157 centres operated using outdated server logic that could not appropriately handle the new answer submission/marking structure. This affected an estimated 379,997 candidates.”

Ethnic sympathisers are not the only ones who ignored Oloyede’s explanations. There are also university autonomy advocates, who argued that JAMB should be scrapped to give way for the University Senate to conduct admission examinations through their admissions offices and admit students who meet their criteria. Their central argument is that universities are stifled by the Big-Brother role of JAMB on admissions and the NUC on curriculum, admissions quota, and even teaching qualifications.

I chorused such arguments until my post-retirement stint as Program Director or member of Governing Councils in some universities. The level of decadence I observed is unprintable. Suffice it to say that the level of corruption and the erosion of values I noticed within the universities led me to wonder what would happen to higher education in the country, without the oversight functions of the NUC and JAMB. Rather than scrap either or both, the focus should be on further streamlining their functions in order to enhance the role of University Senates and their respective admission offices. Moreover, membership of University Governing Councils should be less politicised so that their members could exercise effective control over the University Management.

Operators of Miracle Centers also jumped on the bandwagon of JAMB critics. The JAMB computer glitch offered a golden opportunity for criticising the institution that has all but eliminated their source of income. It was once reported that Miracle Centers charged as high as N200,00 per candidate for the UTME. Incidentally, those Miracle Centres were said to be rampant in the Southeast at the time when some states there produced among JAMB highest scorers.

Ardent critics of JAMB also included some parents, especially those who patronised Miracle Centres, bribed invigilators, employed exam takers, or besieged admission offices on behalf of their children. To be sure, some of them had genuine complaints this time around, but many joined the bandwagon of critics for selfish reasons.

The real problem is that this year’s JAMB computer glitch may have sowed the seed of distrust that may erode confidence in JAMB’s work as in other government institutions. Nevertheless, those who may be thinking along such lines should pause to reflect on two major developments. First, it should be recalled that Oloyede brought significant technological improvements to JAMB’s operations, expanded its physical infrastructure, and imbued the organisation with uncommon culture of transparency, accountability, and effective service delivery. Above all, under his leadership, JAMB had remitted nearly N60 billion to federal government coffers as against a paltry N55 million in the 40 years before Oleyede came on board.

The second development has to do with computer technology. Who among us has not experienced a glitch or two on our computer, printer, tablet, or phone? Hasn’t your phone or an App frozen on you before? If a glitch could occur on an individual’s mobile phone, imagine the ripple effects of a glitch on a network of computers on a large scale.

Such was the case with this year’s SAT exam, taken across the globe. On March 8, 2025, a glitch in the Blue-book App used to keep time, among other services, caused the digital SAT to automatically submit tests early. An incorrect setting in the software caused the glitch, leading to the submission of tests at 11:00am local time, regardless of whether students had finished. The error made its way across the globe. The College Board, which administers the exams, responded promptly, by offering students a full refund and a voucher to retake the exam in as early as two weeks.

A similar fiasco befell Chinese students in 2023, when their computer screen abruptly froze on them while taking the Advanced Placement examinations. On detecting the error, the authorities organised a makeup exam for those affected by the glitch.

In both cases, no one politicised the error and no one asked for anyone’s head. Everyone understood that computer glitches could occur anywhere and at anytime. Oloyede’s JAMB acted in line with international best practices. He should be commended, rather than condemned.

The Nation