WAEC Withdraws 2025 WASSCE Results Over Technical Glitches, Orders Recheck Within 24 Hours
WAEC withdraws 2025 WASSCE results over technical glitches linked to new anti-cheating serialization system.
Candidates urged to await corrected scores as concerns rise over credibility of Nigeria’s exam institutions.
The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has withdrawn the results of the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) just days after they were released, citing technical issues discovered during an internal review.
The announcement was made in a statement issued Thursday and signed by the Council’s Acting Head of Public Affairs, Moyosola Adesina. WAEC disclosed that it had shut down its result-checking portal and advised candidates to disregard the results previously accessed.
According to the council, the issue arose from technical bugs affecting subjects that were part of a recently introduced “paper serialization” innovation an anti-malpractice measure applied to Mathematics, English Language, Biology, and Economics.
“The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) sincerely regrets to inform the general public of technical issues discovered during the internal review of the recently released results,” the statement read. “As a result, access to the WASSCE (SC) 2025 results has been temporarily denied on the result checker portal.”
WAEC urged affected candidates to revisit the portal after 24 hours to access updated and corrected results. It also extended apologies to the candidates and the public, assuring that the situation is being handled with transparency and urgency.
The initial results, released on Monday, showed a disturbing decline in student performance. Out of 1,969,313 candidates who sat the exam, only 38.32 percent representing 754,545 students obtained credit passes in at least five subjects, including English and Mathematics, the minimum requirement for admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions.
Further analysis revealed a gender disparity among the successful candidates: 46.01 percent were male, while 53.99 percent were female.
WAEC attributed the poor outcomes in part to logistical challenges during the May examination period, including reports that students were held at testing centers late into the night.
The examination body had earlier announced that 1,973,365 candidates registered for the exam across 23,554 secondary schools nationwide, with 1,969,313 eventually sitting the tests.
The controversy mirrors a similar incident earlier this year involving the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), which had to cancel and re-conduct the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in some centers following technical disruptions that affected result accuracy.
