By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D, ANIPR
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board’s release of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination results laid bare a profound dereliction of duty.
Of the 1.95 million candidates, approximately 78 per cent were declared to have scored below 200 out of 400—a figure heralded with alarming triumphalism even as students and parents flooded helplines and social media with accounts of blank screens, frozen timers and missing questions. When four out of five participants are deemed “inadequate”, celebration is not called for; shame is.
While distraught families clamoured for answers, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, congratulated himself, insisting that the statistics vindicated anti-malpractice measures. His gloating exposed a startling misunderstanding of his ministerial responsibility: if more candidates fail than succeed under your watch, the fault lies squarely with you.
This fact was lost on the minister. Sadly, it was only after the suicide of 19-year-old Timilehin Faith Opesusi—who received a flawed score of 190— that JAMB’s Registrar, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, conceded that a faulty software patch had incapacitated 157 of the 887 examination centres, corrupting nearly 380,000 scripts and necessitating an emergency resit. Professor Oloyede’s rare admission offered scant consolation to families traumatised by error.
The Minister of Education, Dr Alausa, ought to bury his head in shame because if he had paused his premature self-congratulations to investigate mounting complaints and had real-time monitoring tools been in place to detect server anomalies before they escalated, this catastrophe could have been averted.
Robust disaster-recovery protocols—backup servers and automatic rollback mechanisms—should have been primed to restore normality, rather than leaving candidates stranded and disenfranchised.
The human cost of these systemic failures cannot be overstated. Opesusi’s death was not an isolated tragedy but the most wrenching illustration of a system configured to punish rather than protect. While it is impossible to legislate how every teenager copes with disappointment, it is both possible and imperative to demand safeguards that significantly reduce the risk of preventable despair.
A responsible examination framework employs continuous infrastructure monitoring—standard practice in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia—empowering rapid-response teams to suspend compromised sessions, preserve data integrity and spare candidates needless indignity. Such mechanisms also yield granular analytics, pinpointing failure hotspots by network node, regional centre or question type, thereby informing targeted remediation. Yet JAMB lacked even the most basic of these defences.
By contrast, leading examination bodies abroad treat every anomaly as a clarion call for investigation. In the United Kingdom, the Joint Council for Qualifications imposes a 24-hour embargo on results publication, during which an independent quality-assurance team cross-verifies centre-reported issues against system data and suspends suspect centres from data upload.
A modest levy on registration fees—no more than ₦500—would underwrite these services without burdening households. These initiatives must be accompanied by national public awareness campaigns to destigmatise help-seeking and foster open dialogue around failure and mental health.
The assumption that statistical correction alone suffices as a remedy is fundamentally flawed. Publishing aggregate failure rates without contextualising the technical meltdown amounts to cruelty. Students deserve item-level feedback, transparency in score-normalisation algorithms and a straightforward appeals process.
In addition, legislators must exercise oversight to ensure that such reforms do not wither on the vine. A joint committee of the National Assembly and state education agencies should be mandated to review JAMB’s quarterly progress reports, conduct unannounced audits and hold public hearings on any lapses. This level of accountability would signal to administrators at every tier that responsibility has teeth and that technical negligence carries tangible consequences.
Moreover, civil society organisations, professional associations, and the private sector must actively monitor implementation, provide technical expertise, and advocate for candidate rights. International development partners, including UNESCO and the World Bank, can offer capacity-building support and grant assistance for infrastructure upgrades.
By fostering multi-stakeholder collaboration, Nigeria can leverage diverse resources and best practices to build a robust and inclusive examination ecosystem. Only through collective effort can we ensure the integrity, reliability, and humanity of our high-stakes assessments.
Ultimately, the Minister of Education is responsible. Dr Alausa must convene an emergency roundtable of state education commissioners, teachers’ unions, ICT specialists, mental health professionals, and student representatives to draft a National High-Stakes Assessment Protocol.
This blueprint should enshrine an automatic failure-rate alert triggering pre-publication review whenever pass rates deviate significantly from a five-year moving average; real-time audit access for the National Information Technology Development Agency to every examination server; mandatory sandbox-tested code deployments no less than four weeks before each exam; and the creation of a candidate-welfare fund overseen by a multi-stakeholder board.
Additionally, the protocol must require regular psychosocial assessments to gauge student stress levels and inform the scheduling and format of high-stakes assessments, thus ensuring that policy remains evidence-based and student-centred.
Leadership must extend beyond policy pronouncements to demonstrable accountability. Dr Alausa’s next public briefing should open with a sincere apology, after which he should outline specific, measurable reforms and realistic timelines. Subsequent progress reports, published quarterly, must detail incident-test outcomes, system-uptime statistics and independent audit findings, enabling the public to monitor reform in real time.
These updates should be widely disseminated via national and local media and through JAMB’s digital channels, ensuring that every stakeholder, from candidate to parent, can track improvements.
Ignoring the genuine advances achieved under Professor Oloyede’s stewardship would be uncharitable and a disservice. Biometric verification eliminated millions of fraudulent registrations; the centralised admissions portal streamlined candidate allocation; and dismantling result-selling cartels restored public confidence—until the recent collapse.
Moreover, the shift to Computer-Based Testing (CBT) represented a necessary evolution from paper-driven processes prone to logistical bottlenecks. Yet revolution without resilience remains perilously fragile.
Nigeria’s ambitious youth deserve an examination ecosystem worthy of their aspirations: technical vigilance, transparent redress, and compassionate support are non-negotiable. Reforming JAMB will not resolve every educational deficit alone, but it will signal the seriousness with which we regard youth aspirations.
A generation that misses its first fair test due to technical negligence risks becoming disillusioned with public institutions altogether. Suppose the Minister and his agency can convert an apology into prevention. In that case, they will avert future crises and affirm that Nigeria values competence over rhetoric, innovation over inertia, and its young people over its pride.
Finally, let this moment galvanise a cultural shift in how we conceive, administer and experience examinations. Perfect apologies cannot heal lives, but near-perfect service can restore hope. Only then will the promise of education cease to be eclipsed by the shadow of avoidable failure, and our classrooms once more become crucibles of possibility rather than beacons of hope.
Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D, writes from Abuja
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@
WhatsApp: +2348069716645
