NSUKKA, Nigeria — The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) branch, has threatened to initiate legal action against the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) over what it describes as a “deliberate and targeted” mass failure in the recently released results of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Speaking at a press briefing in Nsukka on Wednesday, May 14, 2025, ASUU-UNN Chairman, Comrade Oyibo Eze, alleged that the results were manipulated to disadvantage candidates from the South East and areas with large Igbo populations, including Lagos State.
“My office has been inundated with protests, calls and visits by parents and the general public on this deliberate massive failure in the 2025 JAMB examination,” Eze said.
“ASUU will challenge this result in High Court if JAMB fails to review the result and give candidates their merited scores.”
According to him, of the 1,955,069 candidates who sat for the 2025 UTME, over 1.5 million scored below 200, with a significant portion of those underperforming coming from the South East.
“JAMB knows that children from the South East must score higher before they can get admission, whereas their counterparts in some parts of the country will use 120 JAMB score to get admission to read medicine,” he claimed.
Eze singled out the case of University Secondary School, Nsukka, where he said no candidate who sat for the exam scored up to 200.
“This school has superlative students who have excelled in academics both inside and outside the school—how come all of them scored less than 200?” he asked.
The ASUU chairman rejected the justification that exam malpractice in certain centres could account for such widespread poor performance.
“I am not against the board punishing those found guilty of exam malpractice,” he said.
“But JAMB should not, because of these few candidates, fail the whole candidates in an exam centre.”
He urged governors from the South East to intervene, warning that continued inaction could trigger wider agitation.
“The governors in the zone should not sit and watch JAMB toy with the academic future of our children,” he said.
“That massive failure has become a national issue which might attract national protest if nothing urgent is done.”
JAMB is yet to formally respond to the allegations raised by ASUU-UNN.
The 2025 UTME has already drawn criticism from multiple quarters following the release of results on May 9, which revealed that more than 78 percent of candidates scored below 200 in the examination out of a maximum 400 points.
