Five-Year WAEC Review Reveals Declining WASSCE Performance As Mathematics Emerges Biggest Challenge

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 As Nigerians await the release of the 2026 school-based West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results for 1,959,636 candidates from 24,277 secondary schools, including selected offshore schools, APATA OYENIRAN examines performance trends over the past five years and what they reveal about the country’s education system:

A five-year review of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) conducted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) reveals a troubling decline in candidates’ performance, with Mathematics emerging as the most persistent obstacle to success.

WAEC, established in 1952, is the foremost examining body serving the English-speaking countries of West Africa—Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia and The Gambia. It conducts standardised examinations and awards certificates recognised internationally.

An analysis of WAEC data covering approximately 8.59 million school candidates between 2021 and 2025 shows that while enrolment has risen steadily, overall performance has deteriorated significantly.

The proportion of candidates obtaining credits in at least five subjects, including English Language and Mathematics—the minimum benchmark for university admission—reached a high of 81.70 percent in 2021 before beginning a steady decline.

The pass rate fell to 76.36 per cent in 2022, recovered marginally to 79.81 percent in 2023, dropped again to 72.12 percent in 2024, and declined sharply to 62.96 percent in 2025, the lowest level recorded within the review period.

The 2025 result was particularly controversial. WAEC initially announced a pass rate of 38.32 percent, but later withdrew the figures and revised them upward after acknowledging grading errors linked to the introduction of a new anti-malpractice system.

The downward trend is even more striking when viewed against the backdrop of rising enrolment. Candidate numbers increased from about 1.29 million in 2021 to nearly 1.97 million in 2025, representing more than a 50 per cent increase. Despite the expanding candidate population, the proportion meeting the university admission benchmark continued to decline, suggesting mounting pressure on the quality of learning outcomes.

Subject-by-subject analysis paints a clearer picture.

English Language has remained the strongest-performing core subject throughout the period. WAEC’s subject reports consistently indicate relatively stable performances in essay and theory papers, even in years when overall results declined.

Mathematics, however, has remained the weakest link.

In 2025, roughly half of all candidates failed core Mathematics, making it the single biggest contributor to the decline in overall performance.

Chief Examiners’ reports repeatedly identify the same areas of weakness. Many candidates struggled with Pythagoras’ theorem, factorisation and simplification of algebraic expressions, cumulative frequency graphs, gradients and equations of straight lines, partial fractions, and statistical concepts such as Spearman’s rank correlation.

Education analysts believe these recurring deficiencies point to deeper problems in mathematics teaching and learning rather than isolated examination difficulties.

The dramatic decline recorded in 2025 was also influenced by WAEC’s introduction of serialised, scrambled and randomised objective question papers in Mathematics, English Language, Biology and Economics.

The innovation was designed to curb examination malpractice by ensuring neighbouring candidates received differently arranged objective questions

While essay scores remained largely stable, objective test performances dropped significantly.

WAEC maintained that the new system exposed candidates who had previously relied on leaked answers or collusion during examinations.

The anti-malpractice drive also led to 192,089 candidates—representing 9.75 percent of the total entries—having their results withheld pending investigations into alleged examination malpractice.

Another consistent trend over the five-year period is the performance gap between male and female candidates.

Available data show that female candidates outperformed their male counterparts every year in the benchmark of five credits, including English Language and Mathematics.

In 2023, female candidates accounted for 52.1 percent of successful candidates, compared with 47.9 percent for males.

The gap widened further in 2025, when females constituted 53.05 percent of successful candidates, while males accounted for 46.95 percent.

The same trend was evident among private candidates, where females recorded 51.61 percent compared with 48.39 percent for males during the 2025 second series examination.

Private candidates—mainly repeaters and out-of-school learners—continued to trail school candidates throughout the review period.

Their combined pass rate in English Language and Mathematics ranged from 42.16 percent in 2022 to a peak of 53.64 percent in 2024, remaining well below the 62.96 to 81.70 percent recorded by school candidates over the same period.

Taken together, the five-year data present a sobering assessment of Nigeria’s secondary education system.

While access to secondary education continues to expand, learning outcomes appear to be weakening. Strong performances in English Language have provided some stability, but persistent weaknesses in Mathematics continue to drag down overall results.

The 2025 anti-malpractice reforms also raise broader questions about whether higher pass rates recorded in previous years may have been influenced, at least in part, by widespread examination malpractice that is only now being effectively curtailed.