By Mercy Aikoye
The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Benjamin Kalu, has urged the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) to commission an independent and transparent audit of its entire examination infrastructure. This call comes in the wake of technical glitches experienced during the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Kalu made this call at a press conference held in Abuja, emphasizing the need for external professionals, system engineers, and academic measurement experts to scrutinize every aspect of the CBT engine, question delivery, answer validation, and result collation processes. According to him, this audit is crucial to ensuring the integrity of the examination process.
The Deputy Speaker also called on JAMB to review all available technical and independent reports, including those from third-party educational technology companies that have gathered candidate-level data. This, he said, would help to fully understand the scope and implications of the crisis relating to the technical glitch that occurred during the examination.
Kalu specifically highlighted the plight of candidates from the Southeast and Lagos, who have already borne the brunt of the failures. He urged JAMB to 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, the Deputy Speaker emphasized the need for coordination with WAEC and other examination bodies to ensure that no candidate’s academic progression is impeded by scheduling conflicts. He also 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.
According to Kalu, technical review results available to him revealed that a critical system patch essential for the new shuffling and validation protocols was not deployed to the server clusters servicing 157 centers in the South-East and Lagos. This omission, he said, affected an estimated 379,997 candidates, whose results were severely impacted due to system mismatches during answer validation.
The Deputy Speaker explained that JAMB had introduced three major systemic changes in the 2025 UTME, including a shift from traditional count-based analysis to source-based analysis, full-scale shuffling of questions and answer options, and systemic improvements aimed at optimizing performance and reducing lag during exam sessions. However, he noted that while these improvements were technologically sound in theory, a major operational flaw was uncovered during the implementation phase.
Kalu disclosed that 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 was not applied to the LAG (Lagos) cluster, which services centers in Lagos and the South-East. This, he said, resulted in candidates in these centers being unfairly disadvantaged, with their responses improperly validated and their scores misrepresented.
The Deputy Speaker emphasized that this was not a failure of the students, nor a deliberate act of sabotage, but a preventable human error within the system. He called on JAMB to implement stronger deployment validation protocols and real-time monitoring mechanisms to prevent recurrence, adding that every system update must be thoroughly tested and confirmed across all server clusters before deployment during high-stakes examinations.
In conclusion, Kalu’s call for an independent audit and transparent communication from JAMB is aimed at rebuilding public trust and ensuring that no affected candidate is left behind. The situation highlights the need for robust systems and processes to support high-stakes examinations like the UTME.
