The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has officially invalidated the initial results of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), affirming that only the results from the recently conducted resit will be considered valid.
Speaking with The PUNCH on Monday, JAMB’s Public Communication Adviser, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, clarified that candidates cannot use their earlier UTME scores, as those results have been withdrawn.
“You can’t have two results. One must be withdrawn — that means the old result has been withdrawn,” Benjamin stated.
This decision comes amid growing concerns from parents whose children performed better in the initial UTME than in the resit. “My daughter scored over 200 in the initial exam but scored below 200 in the resit. Can she use the first result instead?” one parent asked in a message to The PUNCH.
JAMB released the resit results on Sunday. The resit was conducted for approximately 379,000 candidates, mainly in Lagos and some southeastern states, following widespread complaints of technical and human errors that affected the initial examination.
The new results show a noticeable improvement in candidates’ performance. About 200,000 more candidates scored 200 and above in the resit, bringing the total number of such candidates to 565,988 — representing 29.3% of the 1.9 million candidates who sat for the 2025 UTME.
By comparison, only 439,961 candidates (24%) scored above 200 in 2024, while 355,689 (23.36%) reached the mark in 2023. Despite the improvement, the majority — 1,365,479 candidates, or 70.7% — still scored below 200.
The 2025 UTME recorded the highest number of candidates in the board’s history, with 1,931,467 registered — a record since the introduction of the Computer-Based Test format in 2013.
The resit results sparked mixed reactions on social media, with some candidates celebrating significant improvements. Education expert and CEO of Educare, Alex Onyia, shared several success stories via his X (formerly Twitter) page. One message read: “From 155 to 341. This brings me so much joy. I have so many of these types of results in my DM right now.”
A breakdown of the performance revealed that:
- 117,373 candidates (6.08%) scored 250 and above in 2025, up from 77,070 (4.18%) in 2024 and 56,736 (3.73%) in 2023.
- 8,401 candidates (0.46%) scored 300 and above — the highest in recent years — compared to 5,318 (0.35%) in 2023 and just 724 (0.06%) in 2021.
JAMB noted that the improved results reflect a more accurate and fair assessment of candidates’ abilities, having addressed the flaws that marred the initial examination.
