The West African Examinations Council, Nigeria, has released reviewed results for the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination, for school candidates, following the discovery of grading discrepancies that significantly affected candidates’ performance statistics.

In a press briefing on Friday, at the council’s national office in Yaba, Lagos, the Head of WAEC Nigeria, Dr. Amos Dangut, admitted to a serious error in the marking of serialised papers, which led to a misrepresentation of candidates’ performance.

“With deep sorrow and regret, I, on behalf of the Registrar to Council, Management and Staff of WAEC Nigeria, apologise for the discrepancies discovered in the grading of serialised papers.

“This is very difficult for us to say, but we have to admit that it is very embarrassing,” Dangut said.

According to him, the council had implemented a new security innovation known as paper serialisation, already in use by another national examination body.

However, during post-examination reviews, it was discovered that the English Language Objective Test (Paper 3) was scored using incorrect keys due to a wrongly assigned serialised code file.

Other serialised subjects included Mathematics, Biology, and Economics.

“We investigated and discovered that a serialised code file was wrongly used in the printing of the English Language Objective paper.

“This resulted in them being marked with incorrect answer keys. It is important to note that candidates who wrote the exams using the computer-based mode were not affected,” Dangut explained.

With the error corrected, 1,794,821 candidates — representing 91.14 per cent— obtained credit and above in a minimum of five subjects (with or without English and Mathematics).

Notably, 1,239,884 candidates or 62.96 per cent, obtained five credits, including English and Mathematics, a significant improvement from the previously reported 38.32 per cent.

Of this number, 657,819 (53.05 per cent) were female, while 582,065 (46.95 per cent) were male candidates.

However, this still reflects a 9.16 per cent drop from the 72.12 per cent performance recorded in 2024.

WAEC reported that a total of 1,969,313 candidates sat for the examination, including candidates from schools in Benin Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, and Equatorial Guinea, which operate the Nigerian curriculum.

The council also catered to 12,178 special needs candidates, including the visually impaired (112), hearing impaired (615), physically challenged (37), and spastic/mentally challenged (52). These cand