UTME Resit News: JAMB Announces Candidates Can’t Use Initial Scores for Retake!

Candidates cannot use their previous Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination scores in lieu of the results from the most recent retake, according to the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board.

Fabian Benjamin, JAMB’s Public Communication Adviser, informed The PUNCH on Monday that only the retake scores will be accepted, and the original results have been thrown out.

“You cannot have two outcomes.” “One needs to be withdrawn, which implies that the previous outcome has been withdrawn,” Benjamin stated.

On Monday, The PUNCH received a barrage of questions from parents of candidates who took the retest, stating that their children had performed better on the original tests than on the retest.

“My daughter received a score of more than 200 on the first exam, but she received a score of less than 200 on the second one. Can she utilize the first exam’s results, which are superior to this one? Among the parents, one asked.

The retake UTME results were made public by JAMB on Sunday.

The retest was given to 379,000 impacted applicants in Lagos and Southeast states after the board conducted a second exam due to significant outrage over human and technical problems that tainted the first one.

About 200,000 more candidates passed the 200 level, bringing the total number of people who scored 200 and above to 565,988 — or 29.3% of the 1.9 million candidates who took the test — according to the most recent statistics, which demonstrated a noticeable improvement.

In contrast, 355,689 (23.36 percent) achieved the same threshold in 2023, compared to just 439,961 (24 percent) in 2024.

Despite an overall improvement, the majority of candidates, 1,365,479, or 70.7%, still received scores below 200, according to JAMB.

Compared to the first results, which were made public on May 9, 2025, when more than 1.5 million applicants received scores below 200, this represents a minor improvement.

According to the board, 1,931,467 candidates participated in the 2025 exercise, which was the most since the introduction of the computer-based test format in 2013.

Some applicants who took the retest took to X to give their testimony of their new scores, demonstrating that various strokes work for different people.

Alex Onyia, the chief executive officer of Educare, posted applicant testimonials on his X.

From 155 to 341 was the text of one of them. I have so many results of this kind in my direct messages at the moment, which makes me really happy.

In 2025, 117,373 candidates (6.08 percent) scored 250 or higher, compared to 77,070 (4.18 percent) in 2024 and 56,736 (3.73 percent) in 2023, according to a breakdown of top scorers.

In a similar vein, 8,401 applicants (0.46 percent) received a score of 300 or higher in 2025, which was the most in recent years. This is in contrast to 5,318 candidates (0.35 percent) in 2023 and only 724 candidates (0.06 percent) in 2021.

After fixing early errors, JAMB insisted that the updated results show a more equitable evaluation of the candidates’ performance.