‘JAMB fraud detection system flawed, vendors should be sanctioned’- Alex Onyia

In the wake of the outcry that accompanied the results of the 2025 UTME exams, the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) has been hit with yet another accusation as its much-touted fraud detection system has been described as completely flawed. This was revealed by an education activist and CEO of EduCare, Alex Onyia.

Following complaints around discrepancies in scoring and concerns over withheld results, Alex Onyia had invoked the Freedom of Information Act before petitioning JAMB for access to its system. Following his review, it was discovered that more than 300,000 candidates across two zones of the country had been wrongly scored, prompting the board to reschedule exams in those zones.

However, that was not the only discovery Alex Onyia made. Appearing on Arise News The Morning Show, the edtech CEO revealed that the board’s fraud detection system is also flawed and that many candidates are been victimised for fraudulent activities they know nothing about.

“JAMB fraud detection algorithm, that one I know is flawed,” the CEO said during the show. “Their fraud detection algorithm is completely flawed and should be improved on because the way they even used to make the predictions, it doesn’t make sense. They actually need to change that.”

While admitting that the board made some improvements, particularly in changing the pattern of how they do their question rotation and other aspects, there are still gaps in the way a lot of things are structured, and there is an urgent need to review those parts.

“We need to reanalyse the fraud detection process so that people don’t just become victimised. Because a lot of children are presently been victimised for what they don’t know,” the educationist said.

Erring JAMB vendors should be sanctioned

The EduCare CEO also restated his stance that the scandal that accompanied the 2025 UTME results was not a technical glitch, but a clear human error. He noted that the astounding failure rate, as well as the patterns, one of which involved the winner of the national mathematics competition scoring 40 in JAMB, had compelled him to request complaints. He noted that the 18,000 complaints, including 100 candidates contemplating suicide, had prompted him to invoke the FOI.

Armed with this, he was able to get JAMB to make its systems available for scrutiny, a scrutiny which showed only the LAG cluster was affected. And within the LAG cluster, only the Lagos and Owerri zones were affected. The big question became: why did it affect people in these two zones? Why didn’t it affect other zones in the same cluster?

“One thing I really commend JAMB is that JAMB is actually a very transparent organisation and you can see the highest level of sincerity in them. However, there are people that they work with. They work with vendors. The point is, who are these vendors? These people need to come for public scrutiny because we need to understand exactly what happened. And now that we found this because this is actually the biggest, for the past 12 years, what has been happening?” he said.

He noted that the vendors need to explain to Nigerians why these things happen. He said that by the time they are interrogated more, Nigerians will be able to discover more patterns which will help to determine what happened, how it happened and why it will not happen again.

He also pointed out that JAMB does not own the CBT centres. So complaints like the issue of systems shutting down and some questions with no answers, and some answers with no questions are down to their partner CBT centres, even though eventually the board still has to share some of the blame, as they have one full year to do a lot of these checks. He then expressed support for calls for these vendors to be named and erring partners sanctioned.

“I completely agree that service providers and vendors should be sanctioned and prosecuted. Because this is so much of a risk, and the kind of reasons they gave is just too petty for such an important critical system like JAMB. So I feel that they should actually be sanctioned. It is very important,” he noted.

Speaking about improvements that JAMB needs to make quickly, Alex Onyia pointed out the long waiting period after exams, indicating that two days is too long for the results of a computer-based exam to be released.

“I don’t know why we should write JAMB and wait for two days for results to be out. This is 2025, and this is CBT. Children should be able to write exams and see their results immediately. Secondly, I want children to be able to see what they answered and what their own JAMB answer is. Even if it is one week after. Children should be able to do their own reassessment and also maybe raise questions if they want. This actually makes the transparency a lot more easy,” he said.

He also floored JAMB’s onboarding and registration process, noting that sometimes candidates have to wait till midnight for the server to connect so they could register.

“These are inefficiencies that shouldn’t be happening. They need to overhaul the entire process from the beginning to the end so that JAMB exams can be something we can be proud of,” he finished.