TECHNICAL GLITCH—NOT SABOTAGE—BLAMED FOR MASS FAILURE IN 2025 UTME, SAYS EDUCARE TEAM
A comprehensive audit by Educare’s Technical Team has concluded that a major human error—not a systemic failure or foul play—was behind the significant discrepancies and poor performance recorded in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), which affected nearly 380,000 candidates. This revelation was presented during an emergency meeting held at the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) headquarters in Abuja on Tuesday, May 14, led by Registrar Professor Ishaq Oloyede.
Engr. James Nnanyelugo, head of the Educare Technical Team, disclosed that a critical software patch meant to implement new scoring logic and question randomisation features was not deployed to all server clusters. “THIS WAS NOT A FAILURE OF THE ENTIRE SYSTEM. IT WAS A CLEAR CASE OF HUMAN ERROR IN DEPLOYING CRITICAL UPDATES TO ALL SERVER CLUSTERS,” Nnanyelugo emphasized.
The issue primarily affected server clusters covering Lagos and South-East examination centres, resulting in mismatches in how answers were processed for about 157 centres. While updates had successfully gone live in regions served by the Kaduna cluster, those in Lagos were running outdated versions, incompatible with the new backend enhancements introduced for the 2025 UTME. This led to a widespread mismatch in scoring, manifesting in unusually low results.
Educare’s report, based on an analysis of 18,000 student records, revealed that more than 14,000 affected candidates were concentrated in the glitch-hit regions. The team assured that JAMB’s internal audit corroborated these findings and corrective measures are already being implemented.
The incident has triggered renewed calls for improved transparency and contingency planning in national examinations.
