UTME: Educare CEO Reveals How ‘Human Error’ Marred Exam In S/East, Lagos
A report has attributed the technical glitches that led to the unexpectedly poor performance of candidates in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) to human error.
According to a detailed technical report shared by education advocate and Chief Executive Officer of Educare, Alex Onyia, on Wednesday, the issues stemmed from the failure to apply a system patch uniformly across all server clusters.
The patch was necessary to support new systemic changes introduced in the 2025 UTME, including a shift to source-based analysis, full-scale shuffling of questions and answer options, and systemic improvements to optimize performance.
The report submitted by one of the Educare team, Engr James Nnanyelugo revealed that the LAG (Lagos) cluster, which services centers in Lagos and the South-East, was not patched, unlike the KAD (Kaduna) zone.
“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,” the report said.
The report noted that the discrepancy affected approximately 379,997 candidates, whose results were severely impacted due to system mismatches during answer validation.
It added that JAMB had collaborated with Educate Technical , confirming the technical review findings, reinforcing the conclusion that the affected centres were indeed operating under impaired conditions.
“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 analyzed. 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,” the report added.
The report concluded that the error was neither caused by system failure or administrative manipulation but by human error.
“In summary, JAMB opened its systems to independent reviews to restore public confidence and ensure the reliability of the UTME for all stakeholders. And we hereby report that this incident was neither a system failure nor administrative manipulation, but an outright human error,” it said.
Onyia was one of the first to raise concerns about the 2025 UTME results. He questioned the validity of the scores, citing potential technical errors, and even threatened to sue JAMB on behalf of affected candidates.
Onyia asked the board to release detailed marking sheets and allow candidates to verify their scores.
Following his criticism, Onyia was invited by JAMB to participate in a thorough review of the examination.
He announced the development on his X handle, stating that he would share the outcome of the review with the public.
UTME: Educare CEO Reveals How ‘Human Error’ Marred Exam In S/East, Lagos is first published on The Whistler Newspaper
