The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Benjamin Kalu, has called on the authorities of the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) to commission an independent, transparent audit of its entire examination infrastructure.
At a press conference held in Abuja Sunday, Kalu explained that the audit should involve external professionals, system engineers, and academic measurement experts to scrutinize every aspect of the CBT engine, question delivery, answer validation, and result collation processes.
The Deputy Speaker called on JAMB to immediately review all available technical and independent reports, including those from third-party educational technology companies that have gathered candidate-level data, to fully understand the scope and implications of the crisis relating to the technical glitch that occurred during the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The Deputy Speaker argued that only by triangulating internal findings with external audits can ensure that no affected candidate is left behind.
Stating that it is imperative that candidates from the Southeast and Lagos, who have already borne the brunt of these failures, are not further disadvantaged, he remarked that JAMB must provide a clear, accessible mechanism for remark and appeal, especially for those dissatisfied with the hurried resit or who experienced technical difficulties during the second sitting.
Furthermore, he said coordination with WAEC and other examination bodies must continue to ensure that no candidate’s academic progression is impeded by scheduling conflicts.
On transparent communication and data release, he called on JAMB to proactively publish anonymized, candidate-level result data for independent verification and open its systems to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests as a gesture of transparency and accountability.
This, he said, will go a long way in rebuilding public trust.
He also called on JAMB to implement stronger deployment validation protocols and real-time monitoring mechanisms to prevent recurrence, adding every system update must be thoroughly tested and confirmed across all server clusters before deployment during high-stakes examinations.
The Deputy Speaker remarked that he had to wade in due to technical review results available to him, which revealed that a critical system patch essential for the new shuffling and validation protocols was not deployed to the server clusters servicing 157 centres in the South-East and Lagos.
He disclosed that one of the most critical discoveries made revolved around three major systemic changes introduced in the 2025 UTME, adding that the first was a shift from the traditional count-based analysis to a more robust source-based analysis of results.
He said, “In previous years, JAMB evaluated the integrity of examination sessions primarily by counting the number of responses submitted per session. If the majority of candidates in a session of 250 submitted a near-complete set of answers, the session was deemed valid.
“Any significant deviation led to the disqualification of that centre’s results. However, in 2025, a more advanced model was adopted; one that focused on the actual source and logic of the answers provided, rather than just their quantity.
“The second change involved full-scale shuffling of both questions and answer options. This ensured that even two candidates sitting in the same session would not receive identical permutations, thereby enhancing test security.
“The third change was a series of systemic improvements aimed at optimizing performance and reducing lag during exam sessions. This was a major policy change that saw the best and highest obtained UTME score in 15 years; a remarkable achievement by JAMB in principle.
“However, while these improvements were technologically sound in theory, a major operational flaw was uncovered during the implementation phase. The system patch necessary to support both shuffling and source-based validation had been fully deployed on the server cluster supporting the KAD (Kaduna) zone, but it was not applied to the LAG (Lagos) cluster, which services centres in Lagos and the South-East. This omission persisted across all sessions until the 17th session, after which the error was discovered and corrected.
“As a result, approximately 92 centres in the South-East and 65 centres in Lagos, totalling 157 centres, operated using outdated server logic that could not appropriately handle the new answer submission and marking structure. This affected an estimated 379,997 candidates, whose results were severely impacted due to system mismatches during answer validation.
“To verify the scale and accuracy of this issue, JAMB collaborated with the Educare Technical Team, which had gathered response data directly from over 18,000 candidates. After deduplication and filtering, about 15,000 authentic records were analyzed.
“Of these, more than 14,000 originated from the regions serviced by the unpatched LAG servers, confirming the technical review’s findings. Comparative analyses between JAMB’s internal audits and third-party system evaluations revealed significant overlap, reinforcing the conclusion that the affected centres were indeed operating under impaired conditions.
“As a result, candidates in these centres were unfairly disadvantaged, with their responses improperly validated and their scores misrepresented. This was not a failure of our students, nor a deliberate act of sabotage, but a preventable human error within our system.
“We must not underestimate the toll this has taken. Parents and candidates have voiced legitimate concerns about the hurried scheduling of resit examinations, the overlap with ongoing WAEC assessments, the psychological strain, and the logistical burdens of traveling to distant centres on short notice. Reports from the resit examinations held on Friday include complaints of difficult questions, time management issues, more technical glitches, poor centre coordination, and a lack of adequate support for those still affected.”
