The West African Examinations Council has reopened its online results portal for the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination, for School Candidates, following a technical disruption caused by a grading error in one of the examination papers.
In a statement on Saturday, the council confirmed that candidates can now view and verify their results. “The result portal is up again. Candidates can now access, check and recheck their results for WASSCE (SC) 2025. Once again, we apologise for the mishap and appreciate your understanding and support,” WAEC said.
The reopening comes after WAEC admitted to a major error in the marking of serialised papers, which led to inaccurate grading for some candidates. Speaking at a press briefing on Friday in Lagos, WAEC’s Head of the Nigeria National Office, Dr. Amos Dangut, described the situation as both “embarrassing” and “deeply regrettable.”
“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.
He explained that the error arose from the council’s new paper serialisation security measure, in which each examination script is uniquely coded. During the review process, WAEC discovered that the English Language Objective Test (Paper 3) had been scored using incorrect answer keys due to a wrongly assigned serialised code file. Other subjects — Mathematics, Biology, and Economics — were also serialised, but the grading error was limited to English Paper 3.
“This resulted in those papers 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 clarified.
After correcting the error, WAEC announced that 1,794,821 candidates, representing 91.14 per cent, secured credit and above in at least five subjects (with or without English and Mathematics). Of these, 1,239,884 candidates — or 62.96 per cent — obtained five credits including English and Mathematics.
This marks a significant improvement from the earlier figure of 38.32 per cent, though it is still a 9.16 per cent drop from the 2024 performance.
The breakdown shows that 657,819 of those with five credits including English and Mathematics were female (53.05 per cent), while 582,065 were male (46.95 per cent).
In total, 1,969,313 candidates took the examination, including students from schools in Benin Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, and Equatorial Guinea under the Nigerian curriculum.
WAEC also made provisions for 12,178 candidates with special needs, among them 112 visually impaired, 615 hearing impaired, 37 physically challenged, and 52 with spastic or mental disabilities.