In a significant move aimid at deepening transparency and promoting fairness in Nigeria’s tertiary admissions process, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced that the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) result slip will now feature each candidate’s national ranking among their peers.
According to the Board, this new measure aligns with its statutory mandate as a ranking and fairness agency, and is designed to curb the growing trend of sensationalism around high UTME scores. JAMB stated that merely scoring high marks without context has often led to undue public celebration, sometimes based on manipulated or unverified results.
“This new initiative will provide a clearer picture of where each candidate stands among the over 1.9 million who sat for the 2025 UTME,” a JAMB official told reporters. “It’s not just about scoring 300 or more — it’s about how many others did better or worse.”
To illustrate the new ranking model, JAMB released anonymized data showing that:
A score of 370 placed a candidate at 16th position nationwide.
320 was ranked 5,806th.
250 fell at 107,819th.
A score of 200 was ranked 533,805th.
180 was at 948,026th.
140 ranked 1,855,607th, while
A score of 100 was at 1,903,661st out of 1,905,539 total candidates.
The inclusion of rankings is expected to assist tertiary institutions in making more informed admission decisions, particularly in competitive courses. “Knowing that a candidate ranked in the top 5,000 versus someone who barely made the top 500,000 gives clearer context beyond the raw score,” the official said.
The Board also noted that this measure could aid policymakers in assessing calls for the extension of UTME result validity. “Those who advocate for multi-year validity of results will now be able to consider performance trends across different years using ranking as a basis for comparison,” the statement added.
JAMB further hinted that institutions conducting Post-UTME tests (PUTME) may also be required to justify how such internal screenings fit into a broader national ranking framework, should UTME scores be banked across years.
