The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has stated unequivocally that the result of the recently conducted make-up Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) has invalidated the result of the previous one, for those who resat the examination.
The examination body’s Director of Public Communications, Fabian Benjamin, made this revelation on Monday in response to questions from candidates, parents and teachers over the possibility of using the result of the previous UTME – especially for those who performed better in the initial exam than the latest one.
“My daughter scored over 200 in the initial exam and scored lesser than 200 in the resit. Can she use the result of the initial exam which is better than this last one?” one of the parents had asked.
But in response, Benjamin said: “You can’t have two results. One must be withdrawn – that means the old result has been withdrawn,” Benjamin said.
JAMB had rescheduled its exam for over 397,000 candidates across Lagos and five Southeast states following widespread outcry over technical error in the exam system.
The fresh results showed marked improvement as about 200,000 more candidates crossed the 200 mark, raising the total number of those who scored 200 and above to 565,988 — representing 29.3 per cent of the 1.9 million candidates who sat the exam.
In comparison, only 439,961 (24 per cent) crossed the same mark in 2024, while 355,689 (23.36 per cent) did so in 2023.
JAMB noted that although the results reflect an overall improvement, the majority — 1,365,479 candidates, or 70.7 per cent — still scored below 200.
This marks a slight improvement from the initial result released on May 9, 2025, where over 1.5 million candidates scored below 200.
The board stated that the 2025 exercise saw a record participation of 1,931,467 candidates — the highest since the Computer-Based Test format was introduced in 2013.
In a case of different strokes for different folks, some candidates, who participated in the resit, had taken to X to share testimonies of their new scores in the examination.
Chief Executive Officer of Educare, Alex Onyia, shared testimonies of candidates on his X.
One of them read, “From 155 to 341. This brings me so much joy I have so many of this type of result on my DM right now.”
A breakdown of high scorers showed that 117,373 candidates (6.08 per cent) scored 250 and above in 2025, up from 77,070 (4.18 per cent) in 2024 and 56,736 (3.73 per cent) in 2023.
Similarly, 8,401 candidates (0.46 per cent) scored 300 and above in 2025 — the highest in recent years — compared to 5,318 (0.35 per cent) in 2023 and just 724 in 2025
