In what is fast becoming a troubling pattern, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has joined the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) in releasing results plagued by technical errors, leaving thousands of young candidates stranded, confused, and anxious about their academic futures.
WAEC, which on Monday proudly announced the release of the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results for school candidates, made a sudden U-turn just three days later.
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On Thursday, the council disclosed that an internal post-release review had uncovered “technical bugs” in some of the results, prompting it to suspend access to its result-checking portal entirely.
The examination body attributed the issue to a new security measure: paper serialisation. This innovation, deployed in Mathematics, English Language, Biology, and Economics, was designed to combat examination malpractice. But the very system meant to enhance integrity may have instead sabotaged the credibility of the results themselves.
“An internal post-result release procedure revealed some technical bugs in the results,” said Moyosola Adesina, WAEC’s acting head of public affairs. “As a result, access to the WASSCE (SC) 2025 results has been temporarily denied on the result checker portal.”
While WAEC has promised a fix within 24 hours, the damage is already done. For many candidates, some of whom had already checked their scores, the uncertainty is devastating. This year’s WASSCE had already delivered the worst pass rate in over a decade, with only 38 per cent of students securing five credits including English and Mathematics, the basic requirement for tertiary education entry. Whether this figure will change after the corrections is unclear, but public confidence in the process has undoubtedly taken a hit.
Déjà Vu for Nigerian Students
WAEC’s stumble mirrors JAMB’s earlier crisis, when technical glitches corrupted the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) scores of several candidates earlier this year. JAMB, too, admitted fault only after public outcry. Then, as now, the system’s failure was laid at the feet of the very people it was supposed to evaluate: Nigeria’s students.
Both agencies have introduced technology-driven reforms in the name of efficiency, transparency, and malpractice prevention. But these reforms, it seems, are being rolled out faster than they are being tested. And when they backfire, it’s not the institutions that suffer; it’s the students left with uncertain futures and a crushing sense of betrayal by the system.
FURTHER READING
The growing trend of “glitch governance” in Nigeria’s examination bodies points to a deeper problem: lack of robust pre-release testing, poor system design, and a worrying comfort with failure at the highest levels of educational assessment. These are not mere technicalities, they are system failures with real human consequences.
Philip Ibitoye is a Special Correspondent with EKO HOT BLOG. Click here to find daily analysis and critical insight on trending issues in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria.
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