The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has confirmed that candidates will not be permitted to use their original Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) scores in place of the recently conducted resit results.

JAMB’s Public Communication Adviser, Fabian Benjamin, stated in an interview with The PUNCH on Monday that the earlier results have been annulled, and only the scores from the resit will be considered valid.

“You cannot have two valid results. One has to be cancelled — in this case, the previous score has been nullified,” Benjamin explained.

Several parents of students who participated in the resit reached out to The PUNCH with concerns, noting that their children had higher scores in the initial UTME than in the resit.

“My daughter scored above 200 in the first exam, but her resit score was below that. Is it possible to use the better, original result instead?” one parent queried.

The resit results were officially released by JAMB on Sunday.

The decision to hold a resit was in response to widespread complaints about technical failures and human errors that affected the first round of UTME in some areas. Consequently, JAMB organized another exam for approximately 379,000 candidates, primarily in Lagos and the South-East.

Data from the resit shows a significant boost in performance, with an additional 200,000 candidates surpassing the 200 mark. This brings the total number of candidates who scored 200 and above to 565,988, accounting for 29.3% of the 1.9 million candidates who took the test.

For context, only 439,961 candidates (24%) reached the same score threshold in 2024, while 355,689 (23.36%) did so in 2023.

Despite the uptick, JAMB acknowledged that the majority — 1,365,479 candidates, or 70.7% — still scored below 200 in the 2025 exam.

This figure shows a modest improvement from the initial results released on May 9, 2025, where over 1.5 million candidates scored under 200.

The 2025 UTME also saw a historic level of participation, with 1,931,467 candidates sitting for the exam — the highest number recorded since the adoption of the Computer-Based Test (CBT) format in 2013.

On social media platform X, some resit candidates shared their improved scores with joy and relief.

Alex Onyia, CEO of Educare, posted several of these testimonials on his X handle.

One message read, “From 155 to 341. This makes me incredibly happy. My inbox is full of similar stories.”

An analysis of top-performing students revealed that 117,373 candidates (6.08%) scored 250 or higher in 2025 — up from 77,070 (4.18%) in 2024 and 56,736 (3.73%) in 2023.

Additionally, 8,401 candidates (0.46%) scored 300 and above in 2025 — marking the highest figure in recent years — compared to 5,318 (0.35%) in 2023 and just 724 (0.06%) in 2021.

JAMB emphasized that the resit scores provide a more accurate reflection of candidates’ abilities, as they were obtained after resolving the earlier technical issues.