Daniel Otera
The 2025 admissions cycle in Nigeria has been thrown into uncertainty following technical hitches with the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results and disruptions in the Central Admissions Processing System (CAPS). Families and candidates now find themselves navigating a complex web of institutional deadlines, errors, and corrections at a critical stage in the academic calendar.
WAEC’s initial release of the 2025 results on 4 August showed that only 38.32% of 1,969,313 candidates secured credits in five subjects, including English and Mathematics. But an internal review later uncovered a “serialised code file wrongly used in the printing of English Language Objective Tests (Paper 3),” which caused widespread scoring errors. After revision on 8 August, the pass rate improved dramatically to 62.9%.
Against this backdrop, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) announced that all candidates who uploaded their O’Level results before the revised release would have to return to accredited centres and re-upload. The Board explained that previously uploaded results had been cleared from CAPS to eliminate discrepancies and ensure only verified WAEC records were used for admissions.
According to JAMB’s weekly bulletin, “some candidates who sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) with ‘awaiting results’ had prematurely uploaded incomplete WAEC records before the final release. To address the issue, JAMB has mandated a fresh upload for every candidate, irrespective of whether the new results differ from those uploaded earlier.”
The directive has sparked wide debate, with students and parents expressing frustration over timing and access. Fatimah Sadiq, a parent, lamented: “My daughter and I went to the CBT centre on Wednesday, and we were told they have not been able to upload 2025 WAEC results on CAPS. With the University of Ibadan’s post-UTME screening coming up, she may not be able to write the exam without the admission letter from CAPS.”
Another parent, Aliu Kehinde, said: “All I want to do is upload my son’s new result, which was better after WAEC’s review.”
On X, user @winexviv highlighted the urgency: “Post-UTME form closes on the 16th of this month for some universities, and JAMB has still not opened the portal. You may not understand what these students and families are going through.”
These reactions reflect the tension created by overlapping institutional timelines. The 2025 WASSCE involved 1,973,365 registered candidates across 23,554 schools, with 49.60% male and 50.40% female. While the revised 62.9% pass rate offered some relief, it was lower than 2024’s 72.12%, and WAEC also reported withholding results of 192,089 candidates (9.75%) over malpractice.
WAEC’s Head of Nigeria Office, Amos Dangut, explained that serialisation of papers—introduced to discourage malpractice—created the technical scoring problems, especially in English. He also cited delays in some centres, poor compliance with registration deadlines, and ongoing malpractice investigations as additional challenges.
JAMB, too, has faced technical glitches, with some UTME sessions rescheduled earlier this year. The twin crises underscore the fragility of Nigeria’s education infrastructure, even as both WAEC and JAMB push digitisation. WAEC piloted Computer-Based Testing (CBT) for WASSCE in 2025 and aims for full adoption by 2026, while the federal government has announced that NECO and other bodies will follow suit.
For now, JAMB’s re-upload directive may be necessary to safeguard the integrity of admissions, but it has placed nearly two million candidates under severe pressure. The combination of WAEC’s errors and JAMB’s portal challenges continues to test the resilience of Nigeria’s examination and admissions ecosystem.