The fact that the correction of this year’s JAMB errors revealed the best result in 13 years shows that something about this system must change.
By Chimezie Chika
JAMB’s 2025 Fiasco
This year, 2025, the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB), the institution that oversees Nigeria’s yearly university and tertiary education entrance exam known as the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), faced what has turned out to be arguably its biggest trial yet in its long, embattled history of problems and maladministration. The date was May, and the problem was the nationwide outcry concerning the mass failure in the recently released 2025 JAMB results, in which over 75 percent of the nearly 2 million students who sat for the exam scored below 200.
There was even more concern because states that were known to be perennial high performers in JAMB, mostly the entire Southeast and parts of the Southwest, turned out to be among the worst performing in 2025.
While many voices blamed anything ranging from poor education funding and to misalignment of today’s Nigerian youth (the federal minister of education commented that the result was due to JAMB’s effectiveness in curtailing cheating and exam malpractices), others suspected foul play, pointing to how regions that habitually perform high in any exam cannot suddenly fall down the pecking order overnight.
The last point proved to be true when Alex Onyia, an education consultant who runs a CBT startup model, blew the whistle with a series of fact-checkings. The resulting investigation by JAMB revealed that a glitch had occurred in the JAMB CBT system in 157 out of 887 centres during the exam, resulting in mass downgrading of scores. And the regions affected? The same regions that have suffered unusually low scores: the southeast states and parts of the southwest.
The national outrage that followed the JAMB’s admittance to this system failure was even more massive than the initial one, compounded by a tweet by the exam body’s X handle, which began with the words: “Man proposes, God disposes”.
Nigerians saw this recourse to God as a gross lack of accountability by a body which has had a full year and a budget of 18 billion naira ($11 million) to prepare for the exams (the God alibi is a pervasive marker of irresponsibility in Nigeria; whenever politicians and people in positions of responsibility fail to deliver, they reach for the ever handy God alibi. Why? Because they have the evil genius to recognise that Nigeria is a religious country where God has become a subject of poor will).
Meanwhile, the present issue brought the usual hydra-headed Nigerian acrimonies. Blames were traded along political and ethnic lines and, for several days, the issues dominated discussions across radio, television stations, and social media. In a media hearing on May 14, the JAMB registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, issued a national apology—at one point, he broke down in tears—and announced that nearly 400,000 students would resit for the exam from May 16 to May 19.
People saw his show of emotion as an inadequate counterpoint to the psychological pressures students experience yearly with JAMB, which has led to suicides and other instances of self-harm. Those who demanded the resignation of the JAMB registrar were shut down with an immense barrage of ethnic and religious bigotry; whereas, in saner climes, this should have been a forgone issue: if a public officer unaccountably fails in his duty, he takes the responsibility and is punished accordingly after a thorough investigation—for in such sensitive public offices, the room for failure is zero.
But I am referring to saner climes. Here, we are always faced with—and bogged down by—the baffling phenomenon that is the Nigerian condition.
Is It Time to Scrap Jamb?
This is not the first time JAMB has come under fire for its failures. Founded in 1978, the body’s 47 year history has been mired by errors, scandals, compromises, and criticisms. Issues of malpractice have been widespread, as have been fundamental errors with the previous method of test, which led to frequent calls for the scrapping of the body.
One 1993 article in The Nigerian Economist captured the prevailing sentiments about JAMB in those years, which still persist today. It noted that the method for university admissions prior to the creation of JAMB was through internal processes determined by the individual institutions.
All a student needed to do was to purchase the entrance forms of the universities and tertiary institutions he was interested in and sit for their internal exams, if required. The article noted that, aside merit, JAMB’s admissions process was geared towards geopolitical balance—essentially a quota system. But when JAMB began to operate, its issues started almost immediately. For one, there was a much-decried inefficiency with the release of results due to poor postal systems and other systemic and infrastructural issues at the time.
When the exam body introduced the CBT system in 2013, its aim was to mitigate some of these problems that have bogged its history. Yet, the JAMB CBT system seemed to have been unable to solve many of the body’s older problems.
Having now been used for more than a decade, JAMB’s CBT system is still unable to give instant test scores, a major flaw for which the body has received criticism. On one hand, the argument is that the body has outgrown operating such outdated technology. Taking days to release a CBT exam leaves room for corruption and error.
On the other hand, aggrieved voices often point to the exam’s limited one year validity, which seems to be a commercial rather than a practical decision attuned to the country’s unique needs and economic conditions. Such a body, a government one, should not be structured as a profit-making institution; that mandate creates some of its recurrent problems. Perhaps increasing the validity to two years could solve its ethical problems.
The main argument for scrapping has a lot to do with the fact that almost all of Nigeria’s public universities run internal admissions exams—collectively called the POST-UTME—in addition to JAMB, which appears to defeat the point of the latter’s creation. To all intents and purposes, this two-pronged admissions process especially renders the idea of JAMB superfluous.
It seems rather counter-productive to make what should be an easy enough process more inefficient and bureaucratic. In many countries, the route to university admission is more direct (in short, as the Nigerian Economist article referred to earlier pointed out, this was the practice before the inception of JAMB).
In countries such as the United States, which has a massive collegiate economy, the process of admission is still direct, only requiring students to buy as many university forms as their financial capacity allows.
That one student could receive multiple admissions has never been an issue in the US (a country with a bigger population), yet champions of JAMB claim that that was one of the reasons JAMB was created. Instead of the more viable multiple admissions, the country has exchanged that prospect for a system that allows a choice of only two universities in the yearly JAMB form, thus creating pressures unrelated to academic excellence and merit. The profit-making inefficiencies of this injunction cannot be overstated at this point.
Countries like India address this problem of low choice by having specific entrance exams for certain select courses, such as engineering, medicine, and others. I am not particularly enthused by the prospect of this method in Nigeria, but lessons can perhaps be learned thereof.
A Failure of the Education System?
In recent years, successive Nigerian governments have paid little attention to the education sector. Budgeting as a percentage of the GDP has been very low since the end of the Jonathan regime. Poor infrastructure and low funding in critical areas persist. Then there are the accusations of ethnic bias regarding certain regions and the cut-off marks required of them in national exams. Most southern states are usually required to score far higher than those elsewhere.
Still, there is a sound argument for the preservation of the quota system in a multiethnic country with a wide social divide. One, however, expects this quota system to taper off at some point when the educational infrastructure has been levelled out across the country. On this note, it is catastrophic that funds geared towards this process are still being misappropriated.
Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that the CBT improved some of JAMB erstwhile perennial issues, especially its reduction of exam malpractice. But the body still needs to do more to safeguard the integrity of exams. The present direction of criticism is one that JAMB should heed as a matter of urgency: the fact that its CBT system is not automated. In a world where exam technologies have advanced far ahead, the CBT system should be able to mark and release results within minutes of the exams’ end. Meaning that students should be able to return home the same day with their results.
Needless to say, the implementation of these things is often reliant on the priorities of the incumbent government. Inevitably, a government’s policies are the sum of the priorities and values upheld by that government.
Education has poor support in Nigeria (for detractors who would argue otherwise, check the Finnish system) because its leaders hold a superficial value for wealth, greed, and misappropriation of public funds above education. Based on the actions of the last two governments and the ricocheting effect of that on the Nigerian economy, education is no longer seen as the way to collective national prosperity. What prevails at present is a circus of clout-mongering and the malfeasances that come with it.
But we cannot erase the crucial role that education plays in raising the HDI of a country. The benefits of education as a poverty alleviation scheme are immense. The major question that the Nigerian education system must face and answer is one of establishing and realigning ethical principles, which at the moment is full of passionate confusion.
What is the organising ideology upon which Nigeria’s education was built? A realignment of that will go a long way in putting the priorities of the country’s education sector—and its institutions and bodies—in the right place. Part of the qualitative bankruptcy we experience is the near-absence of any state educational ideology, and that must change. The fact that the correction of this year’s JAMB errors revealed the best result in 13 years shows that something about this system must change.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1.