Nigeria’s Examination System Faces Significant Challenges
Nigeria hosts the world’s largest standardized examinations annually, with nearly 2 million candidates participating in the Unified Tertiary Education Examination (UTME) across hundreds of computer-based testing centers nationwide. From a logistical perspective, this colossal undertaking represents a significant business opportunity. However, the system operates well beyond its intended design limits, and the repercussions are dire for the young individuals it aims to serve.
2025 Exam Crisis Illustrates Systemic Issues
The 2025 UTME crisis exposed these shortcomings starkly. A software glitch disrupted the exam for around 380,000 candidates due to outdated server software. While most centers had the latest updates, 157 centers, particularly in Lagos and southeastern Nigeria, failed to implement necessary patches. This oversight led to freezing screens, unexpected logouts, and inaccurate scoring, causing weeks of protests across the nation. Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, the JAMB Registrar, took responsibility by publicly apologizing and offering affected candidates the option to redo the examination for free. While this accountability is commendable, it highlights a troubling reality—the need for better systems designed to prevent such failures in the first place.
Recurrent Challenges Highlight Systemic Flaws
Less frequently discussed is the fact that this incident was part of a troubling pattern. Candidates have faced power outages, system crashes, and login errors in multiple years, including 2015, 2023, 2024, and 2025. The mock exam for 2026 once again sparked outrage, as candidates and parents reported similar glitches and power outages across various centers. Rather than attributing these issues to mere bad luck, it becomes apparent that a lack of structural investment in the platforms’ reliability may be at the root of the problem.
Insufficient Investment in Critical Infrastructure
Despite a budget allocation of N2.7 billion for CBT infrastructure in 2024, critical gaps in the network architecture remain unresolved. A significant concern is that the entire South East region relies on a server cluster located nearly 1,000 kilometers away in Lagos, with no local failover mechanisms. This architectural decision led to the loss of exam sessions for approximately 200,000 candidates in the South East when the Lagos server encountered issues in 2025. This problem is not merely a technological oversight; it is fundamentally a governance and procurement issue masquerading as a technical one. Organizations managing critical infrastructures, such as banks, telecommunications, and hospitals, typically invest in redundancy to mitigate the unacceptable costs of failure. JAMB’s CBT platform is similarly mission-critical, overseeing college access for millions of Nigerian youths, yet seems to lack a comparable risk tolerance.
Human Impact of System Failures
The human cost of these systemic failures must be acknowledged. A tragic case involved 19-year-old Timirehin Faith Opessi, who reportedly died by suicide following a score her family believed misrepresented her academic capabilities. It later emerged that her score was likely among those corrupted by a software glitch. Behind the staggering figure of 380,000 affected candidates lie individual stories of students who dedicated months to preparing for the exams, families who sacrificed financially for registration and transportation, and young lives hinging on a single number produced by faulty software. Such outcomes call for more than mere apologies; they demand action and systemic reform.
Proposed Solutions for Systematic Improvement
To effectively address these challenges, three key actions are essential. First, it is imperative that all CBT centers operate local exam servers that can cache candidates’ sessions upon login. In the event of a lost connection to the national server during the exam, the session should continue locally, with synchronization occurring once the connection is restored. This kind of resilient, offline-first system has proven successful in banking and healthcare, and there are no significant technical barriers to implementing it within JAMB’s infrastructure—only procurement and engineering priorities stand in the way.
Implementing Enhanced Safety Measures
Next, implementing continuous local storage of exam session states—every 30 seconds—would ensure that candidates can restart from their last saved answer in the event of a computer freeze or restart, rather than losing all their progress. This is a matter of design, not hardware, and many platforms servicing millions of Nigerian learners have implemented such features successfully. JAMB must adapt these proven techniques.
Enhancing Software Reliability Through Validations
Finally, JAMB should prioritize automatic deployment validation. The glitch in 2025 occurred primarily because software updates were not checked thoroughly across all centers before the exam. Modern release management systems can easily flag these discrepancies. JAMB must ensure that software updates have been validated at all centers before proceeding with deployments to over 700 sites. This is standard practice in the software industry and should not be considered an advanced feature. With the engineering talent available in Nigeria, many established edtech platforms are already operating with better infrastructure and resilience than JAMB’s CBT system. The gap lies not in capability, but in institutional commitment to reform.
Ongoing Efforts and Integrity in Education
While JAMB has made progress—transforming from paper to digital formats, combating exam malpractice, and enhancing security protocols—the integrity of processes and infrastructure remains paramount. Without ensuring both, the systems designed to protect students will ultimately fail them. For the millions of candidates who depend on these exams annually, technology must be viewed as an essential component of the educational landscape, not an afterthought.
Oluwasegun Ige is the Engineering Lead and Head of Operations at Class54, a Nigerian education technology platform, and also serves as the Technology Lead at BudgIT, a civic technology organization.
