JAMB 2025: How Nigeria’s university entrance exams went wrong
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Hello, it's Hannah Gelbart here and you're listening to What in the World from the BBC World Service. Imagine studying for months to get into university and on the day you sit the exams, the system crashes. That is what happened to nearly 2 million students in Nigeria this year during the national jam test. There were power cuts, login failures. So many students were unable to finish their tests and only one in five of them passed.

A 19-year-old woman who was resitting the exam took her own life when she got her results. And this caused national outcry. Now hundreds of thousands of Nigerian students have been told they can resit the test. But people still want answers. Why did this happen? And what does it say about Nigeria's infrastructure?

Let's hear now from Medina Meshanu, who is speaking to me from Abuja, Nigeria. Hi. Hi, how are you? Yeah, I'm well, thank you. Tell me a bit about the JAM exams. What are they and why are they so important for students? So the JAM exams in Nigeria are basically the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board exams.

So these exams basically determine whether a student gets into the university or not. If you do not pass JAM, you have to wait till the next year. And tell me a bit about what happened when students sat the exams back in March. This year, about 80% of the students got low grades. So many of the students faced technical issues with their devices, their computers, and

So they complained about not being able to log into the computers, questions not showing up or other people's profiles randomly showing up while they were answering their questions. They will just see another person's profile coming up or different questions that I know there's coming up on their screen.

And also power cuts. Power cuts made it impossible to take the exams in many places. So after the results were released, it was terrible. I don't think JAM has ever witnessed something like this. The results were very, very bad. So it really garnered attention from people, especially online. There was a public outcry which forced JAM to take some measures. You've been speaking to students about these exams. What

were the difficulties that they faced? Yes, I spoke to a few students. For example, there was a young guy I spoke to. He told me that he logged in after he arrived his centre, he logged in into almost three computers, but they kept rejecting his login. And when he finally got the chance to log in before he even had the chance to go over the questions, the computer went off.

And he said that he wasn't the only person with that issue. And when they changed his device, they gave him another computer. When he started to attempt to answer the questions, then somebody else's profile came up.

and showed on his screen. When he complained to the staff there, they told him to wait and just let's see what will happen. That's what they told him basically. So then other students also started having issues, like 50% of the people in his hall had issues. So the staff there were forced basically to give them attention and figure it out. So I've

After like wasting so much time, they were able to rectify the issue. But then it took only 10 minutes before they told them time was up. And when they complained to them that these issues that we faced,

that made us delay answering our questions is not our fault. It's the fault of the devices that you gave us. The staff told them that it really wasn't their problem. The time was up. They told them so, so, so minutes and the minutes are up. Just to add, there's a certain young lady also that took her life after she saw that she scored bad in the exam. So the impact was terrible on students'

Let's just pause for a minute and hear from some students who sat the exam. And when they're talking about scoring, just to give you some context, if they get 200 or more out of 400, that's enough to get a university place.

My name is Nwokbofe Ofred. I'm 20 years old and I'm hoping to study history and international relations in the University of Port Harcourt, River State. I currently live in a remote part of Cross River State, close to the Cameroon border, and because of poor access to technology there, I decided to register for my jam in a Boeing state, my home state. I work

I worked so hard studying and preparing for this exam. I wrote my first jam in 2022, but I didn't get admitted. I lost confidence and belief in myself since then and I did not try again. It took a lot of determination and morale to register for the exam again this year. And so I worked extra hard because I knew I had to get in this time.

I sat for my exam on the day and I wrote very well. I was 100% sure I was going to score up to 300. Then the results came out and I scored 150. I was crushed. It took all I had not to break down. I cried for days because I knew I did not deserve it. Then the JAM registrar dropped a comment. It was like they did not care about the psychological effects that the actions had on us. I had never hated being a citizen of this country as much as I did that minute.

My name is Yahya Fredy Natsaka. I'm one of the students affected by the germ error. So actually I feel hopeless and when I see my result I couldn't believe it because like I sent the message to the germ office like 20 times because I didn't believe my score was too low. I studied for almost

Five months before these exams and every day I studied for like two to three hours but the system went off three times during the exams. Hi, my name is Mario Chikuma. I'm 18 and I hope to study mechanical engineering. While I was writing the exams, the mouse had up and down keys. When I wanted to go down, I just figured that let me just use the mouse. While I typed the down button on the mouse, the

timer reset to two hours again i was like on one hour 20 minutes or so the timer went back to two hours and my questions went to zero like answer questions it was zero i was like okay what is going on no problem then an engineer saw this he seems he was looking at me and i was like hey your questions are you sure this is like no something happened then he went to reset it and i had to start again from the beginning that day was odd i know students that

They went six months preparing for this exam and they saw 154 on their score sheets. Some of them went wild. They went into sadness and it was heartbreaking to see that. So as you can hear, this had a really big impact on students and they're still trying to process it all. Medina, has JAM offered an explanation for what caused the glitches?

JAM blamed the issue, the glitches on the failure of their computer systems to upload exam responses in some areas during the first few days of the exams.

They apologized to people and they said that they knew that it has caused painful damage and trauma that affected so many young Nigerians. And due to that, JAM announced that students will be able to retake their exams in some of the affected areas. So students have already started taking their exams from Saturday.

So they're now able to resit, some people are now able to resit their exams. But what was the exam board's initial reactions when people were complaining? The Minister of Education, he replied when students started complaining and he said that he blames the failure of students on the high level of malpractice.

that caused even more public outcry because there has been no year that students have felt like this. And for a minister to come out and say, oh, basically, we think it's the fault of the students. We didn't let you cheat. That is why you didn't pass the exam. People took it as an insensitive comment. You can imagine why, because, you know, students have

been studying hard for these exams they're only once a year even talking about this with you is giving me exam anxiety and I haven't done exams for years so what caused them to acknowledge accept responsibility and allow students some students to reset their exams?

Honestly, I think it's the public outcry. The pressure became so much. And then the suicide from that young lady, it was the final straw. And then also in a press conference, the jam registrar, Ishak Oluwede, he broke down in tears as he apologized to many young Nigerians. So I think it's just the pressure from every angle and then the suicide.

Do we know if anything is going to be different about the retakes to make sure that they go more smoothly? Well, JAM has not really said anything about what is going to be different, but they just promise that they have taken out time to figure out what the issues are, the technical issues that caused the failure, and they will do their best to make sure it doesn't happen again.

And what are students saying about all this? Do they have other demands? A lot of students that I spoke to are just calling for a chance in life. Many of these students are underprivileged and some of them even came from the village. So going to the university is the only chance they have to make it in life. They're just calling for a fair retake. They at least just want to have good computers.

and steady lights. How much of it was to do with power cuts? So in most areas, power cuts were a vital problem because if your computer goes off, there's nothing you can do. And even if you get the electricity back, your system has to reboot and it might affect how your system would work or your previous answers.

But I just have to point out that most places were not affected by power cuts. Most places were more affected by the technical glitches and the faulty equipments and computers. I hear you that it wasn't just the power, that there were a host of other issues. But power cuts are quite common in Nigeria, right? Is the government doing anything to address those? Yeah, power cuts are very common in Nigeria and it has been a problem for years, decades, if not decades.

More than 90 million people out of Nigeria's 230 million population live without access to electricity. And this is the highest proportion in any country. So the government keeps saying that they have launched various initiatives or programs to end this problem. But really, for us Nigerians that live here, we haven't really seen any changes. Recently, the issue became so bad that even the presidential villa

where the Nigerian president lives. They had to buy solar panels worth of billions of naira just because they also do not have steady electricity. So this is a clear indication that the many initiatives that they have launched are clearly not working and the problem is far from solved. Modina, thank you so much for speaking to us. Thank you for having me.

Around the world, there are lots of different challenges that students face when it comes to getting into university. And we've also talked about the Korean university entrance test, the Sunung on the podcast. We asked if it's the world's most stressful exam. And you can listen to that episode wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

That's it for today. Thank you for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. And if you're in the middle of your exams or you've got exams coming up and you need a break from revision, you can always find us here. We'll see you next time. Bye.