The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has released updated and accurate results for the 2025 May/June West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), following the discovery of a technical error that affected the initial release.
Speaking at a news conference held on Friday in Yaba, Lagos, the Head of National Office, WAEC Nigeria, Dr Amos Dangut, described the new release as the authentic and final version of the results. He revealed that 1,969,313 candidates sat the school-based examination, and 1,239,884 candidates—representing 62.96%—obtained credits and above in at least five subjects, including English Language and Mathematics.
This new figure marks a significant improvement from the initially released results, where only 38.32% of candidates were reported to have achieved the same benchmark. According to Dr Dangut, the discrepancy was due to a technical error involving the scoring of some serialised exam papers, particularly English Language Objective Tests (Paper 3).
He explained that the Council had adopted an innovation known as paper serialisation, already in use by another national examination body. However, during an internal post-examination review, it was discovered that a wrong serialised code file had been used during the grading process, leading to candidates being scored with incorrect answer keys.
“During an internal post-examination review of our earlier released results, some discrepancies were discovered in the grading of serialised papers,” Dangut said. “We further investigated all the serialised papers and discovered that a serialised code file was wrongly used in the printing of English Language Objective Tests (Paper 3), which resulted in them being scored with wrong keys.”
He noted that candidates who wrote their exams using the computer-based mode were not affected by the error. The council has since corrected the problem, and candidates can now access their updated results through the official result-checking portal at www.waecdirect.org.
Providing further details, Dangut disclosed that out of the 1,239,884 candidates who achieved the minimum requirement, 582,065 (46.95%) were male, while 657,819 (53.05%) were female. However, compared to the 2024 edition of the exam, this year’s performance represents a 9.16% decline from the 72.12% recorded last year.
As previously announced, results for 191,053 candidates, representing 9.75% of the total number of candidates, are still being withheld due to various reported cases of examination malpractice. These cases are currently under investigation to determine the appropriate course of action. The number of withheld results represents a decline from the 11.92% recorded in the 2024 and 2023 editions of the examination.
The Council extended an apology to candidates, parents, schools, and other stakeholders for the confusion and distress caused by the initial error.
“We sincerely apologise for this imbroglio and deeply regret the emotional and mental dismay it might have caused the affected candidates and all stakeholders,” Dangut said. “We have been able to fix the anomaly, and candidates can now access their results.”
He assured that measures have been put in place to prevent a recurrence of such errors in the future.
