The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, has called on the management of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board to urgently carry out an independent system audit and review all reports concerning the glitch that characterised the conduct of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.

Recall that the 2025 exercise was greeted with massive failure as a technical error compromised results affecting about 380,000 candidates that sat for the examination.

JAMB Registrar, Prof Ishaq Oloyede while publicly owning up to the poor outing last week, wept publicly while assuring the affected candidates that JAMB will provide them the opportunity to resit the examination.

Addressing journalists in Abuja on Sunday, Kalu noted that the events surrounding the 2025 UTME have shaken public confidence in one of the nation’s most critical gateways to opportunity.

According to him, the mass outcry that followed the release of the results, and the subsequent technical review, demands not only transparency but decisive action to restore faith in the country’s educational system.

The Deputy Speaker commended the JAMB boss for accepting responsibility for the outcome of the exercise, saying, “The swift apology and the decision to offer retake opportunities for all affected candidates reflect a commitment to fairness and justice.”

He noted that though the apology was in order, it does not erase the trauma, disruption, and uncertainty experienced by the candidates and their families.

He lamented the case of a candidate who committed suicide owing to the outcome of the UTME exercise.

Kalu said the technical review results available to him have 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.

“One of the most critical discoveries made revolved around three major systemic changes introduced in the 2025 UTME. The first was a shift from the traditional count-based analysis to a more robust source-based analysis of results.

“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 optimising 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.”

He continued that 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 analysed.

“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.”

To forestall a reoccurrence, Kalu urged JAMB to “Commission an independent, transparent audit of its entire examination infrastructure. This audit should involve external professionals, system engineers, and academic measurement experts to scrutinise every aspect of the CBT engine, question delivery, answer validation, and result collation processes.”

He also called on the examination body 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.

“Only by triangulating internal findings with external audits can we ensure that no affected candidate is left behind.”

He also advocated protection for students in Lagos and the South-East zone, who have already borne the brunt of these failures, noting that they should not be further disadvantaged.”

According to him, “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.

He further urged the examination body to “Proactively publish anonymised, candidate-level result data for independent verification and open its systems to Freedom of Information requests as a gesture of transparency and accountability.”