The West African Examinations Council (WAEC), Nigeria, has released revised results for the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for school candidates, following the discovery of significant grading errors that distorted candidates’ performance data.
During a press conference on Friday at the council’s national headquarters in Yaba, Lagos, the Head of WAEC Nigeria, Dr. Amos Dangut, acknowledged a serious error in the marking process involving serialised examination papers.
“With deep sorrow and regret, I extend an apology on behalf of the Registrar to Council, Management, and Staff of WAEC Nigeria for the discrepancies found in the grading of serialised papers,” Dangut stated. “This is difficult for us to admit, but we acknowledge the embarrassment it has caused.”
Dr. Dangut explained that the error stemmed from the council’s adoption of a new exam security measure known as paper serialisation, already used by another national examination body. However, during the post-exam review, it was discovered that the English Language Objective Test (Paper 3) was graded using the wrong answer key due to a misassigned serial code file.
In addition to English, other affected serialised subjects included Mathematics, Biology, and Economics.
“Our investigation revealed that an incorrect serial code file was used during the printing of the English Language Objective paper, which caused the answer keys to be mismatched,” he said. “It’s important to note that candidates who took the exam using the computer-based testing mode were not impacted.”
Following corrections, updated statistics show that 1,794,821 candidates — representing 91.14% — earned credit and above in at least five subjects (with or without English and Mathematics).
Furthermore, 1,239,884 candidates, or 62.96%, obtained five credits including English and Mathematics — a significant increase from the initially reported 38.32%. Of this number, 53.05% (657,819) were female and 46.95% (582,065) were male.
However, this year’s performance still marks a 9.16% decline from the 72.12% recorded in 2024.
WAEC also confirmed that a total of 1,969,313 candidates participated in the exam, including students from WAEC-accredited schools in the Benin Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, and Equatorial Guinea — all of which follow the Nigerian curriculum.
Among the candidates were 12,178 special needs students, including 112 visually impaired, 615 hearing impaired, 37 physically challenged, and 52 spastic or mentally challenged individuals. Their results have also been processed and released.
