LAGOS, Nigeria — Oluwaseun Adebayo, 17, had answered 38 of the 60 questions on his mathematics paper when the screen went black. The generator at his examination center in Ikorodu, on the outskirts of Lagos, had run out of diesel; the backup inverter lasted 11 minutes. When power returned, an hour later, the system showed his paper as submitted with 22 questions blank.
“Everyone was shouting. The invigilator was on the phone,” he said. “They told us to go home and wait for a message.”
Nigeria’s West African Senior School Certificate Examination, the exam that determines university entry for most of the country’s teenagers, was held fully on computers for the first time this autumn, with 1.9 million candidates sitting at 4,200 centers over three weeks. The examination council said on Monday that 112 centers had experienced disruptions serious enough to require candidates to retake at least one paper, affecting an estimated 61,000 students, and that retakes would be held over the next two weeks. The council described the sitting as “substantially successful.”
The shift to computers, piloted in 2024 with a small group of private schools, was meant to end a culture of leaked question papers and impersonation that had made the exam a byword for malpractice. Papers are now drawn from a question bank in a randomized order, and candidates are identified by fingerprint. The council said that malpractice reports fell by 70 percent compared with last year’s paper-based sitting.
“The integrity gains are real and we will not go back,” said Dr. Ibrahim Danladi, a spokesman for the council in Lagos. He said that 94 percent of centers had completed all papers without incident, and that the council had required each center to have a generator and a backup, but that “some centers’ backups were not what they had declared.” Centers found to have misrepresented their equipment would be barred from the next sitting, he said.
Nigeria’s national grid supplies, on a good day, about 4,500 megawatts to a country of 230 million people, and most schools, like most businesses, rely on diesel generators whose fuel has tripled in price since subsidies were removed in 2023. Internet connections in rural centers depended on mobile networks that slowed under the load of hundreds of simultaneous uploads.
Mrs. Ngozi Okonkwo, the principal of a public secondary school in Enugu, in the southeast, said her center had spent 1.4 million naira, about $900, on diesel for the exam period, money the school had raised from parents. “We were lucky,” she said. “The school across the road had a generator that was older than the students, and their candidates will be writing again. The ministry should pay for diesel if it wants the exam on computers. It cannot be the parents.”
Mr. Adebayo has been assigned a retake on Oct. 21. He said he had started revising mathematics again, though he had already done it once. “I do not mind the computer,” he said. “I mind the dark.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the European edition with the headline: Nigeria Moved Its Biggest School Exam Onto Computers. Then the Power Went Out..
