As a Nigerian citizen and a professional in Cyber Security with deep concern for the integrity and resilience of national digital systems, I find it necessary to address the unfolding issues surrounding the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) administered by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). The series of failures reported in this year's CBT (Computer-Based Testing) exercise represents not only technical inefficiencies but also expose critical flaws in the design, implementation, and governance of high-stakes digital platforms in Nigeria’s educational landscape.
The scale of disruptions ranging from missing examination questions, system crashes, and slow response interfaces to inaccurate scores and mismanagement of examination timing paints a troubling picture of back-end instability and operational breakdown. These are not minor oversights but foundational failures in the architecture and quality assurance mechanisms of the platform tasked with shaping the academic futures of millions of young Nigerians.
From a cybersecurity and digital infrastructure perspective, such breakdowns suggest a combination of inadequate system testing, poor deployment practices, and insufficient safeguards for ensuring uptime, fairness, and data integrity. The reports of questions disappearing mid-exam, erratic time allocation, or score misrepresentation raise legitimate concerns about the authenticity and auditability of the CBT platform’s underlying codebase and logic. These symptoms point toward an unoptimized backend that is either overloaded, insecure, or both, exposing it to potential data loss, corruption, or even manipulation, whether accidental or intentional.
Moreover, the inconsistencies in timing where candidates report their allotted time starting before login, running out early, or failing to synchronize across sections indicate poor server-client communication protocols and a lack of synchronized time-tracking mechanisms. This is particularly worrisome in standardized testing environments where even a few seconds of disadvantage could distort outcomes. Without embedded diagnostic logs, real-time monitoring tools, and independent scoring validation processes, it becomes nearly impossible to guarantee the credibility of the results or restore public confidence.
In this context, JAMB’s public acknowledgment of technical errors is a step in the right direction, but it is not sufficient. The crisis calls for a structured and transparent remediation process, one that begins with a forensic audit of the software, hardware, and administrative processes involved. It is imperative that JAMB subject its entire infrastructure to an independent, professional system audit led by cybersecurity and digital infrastructure experts. Such an audit must examine the examination engine, its scoring algorithms, its data protection protocols, and its resilience to traffic surges, faults, and cyber threats.
Additionally, future deployments of CBT technology must adhere to global standards for software development, including a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC), rigorous quality assurance testing, penetration testing, and pre-examination simulations under real-world loads. Beyond technology, a comprehensive disaster recovery and failover strategy must be implemented to ensure that technical issues at one center do not disrupt the experience or compromise the outcome of all candidates involved.
The issue at hand is not only technical, it is systemic and speaks to the broader need for national digital platforms to be treated with the same level of critical oversight, ethical responsibility, and professional scrutiny as financial or national security systems. The consequences of failure, as we have seen, are deeply human affecting dreams, mental health, and national trust.
As a nation, we must evolve from viewing digitalization as a matter of automation to understanding it as a matter of accountability. We must secure our platforms not only from cyber threats but from fragility and poor governance. The JAMB crisis is a sobering reminder that we cannot afford to digitize recklessly. Our systems must not only function; they must be resilient, transparent, and worthy of the trust the public places in them.
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Nice one
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