The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has withheld the results of 167,486 candidates who sat the 2026 Computer-Based West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for school candidates, citing widespread examination malpractice. The figure accounts for 8.59 per cent of all candidates who took the examination this year.
WAEC Announces Release of Results in Lagos
The Head of WAEC Nigeria National Office, Dr Amos Dangut, announced the release of the results in Lagos on Wednesday. He said the withheld results were linked to infractions ranging from the use of mobile phones inside examination halls, despite an existing ban, to coordinated cheating in certain schools. Dangut also disclosed that supervisors and invigilators caught assisting candidates had been arrested and would be referred to the relevant state ministries of education for disciplinary action.
Despite the scale of the problem, the malpractice rate declined from 9.7 per cent recorded in the 2025 examination. This year's examination, conducted between April 24 and June 19, 2026, was the second edition of the Computer-Based WASSCE for school candidates.
2026 WASSCE Performance Breakdown
A total of 1,959,668 candidates from 24,207 schools across Nigeria, Benin Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, and Equatorial Guinea registered for the examination, with 1,950,726 eventually sitting for it. Of those who sat, 1,200,514 candidates, representing 61.54 per cent, earned credit passes in at least five subjects including English Language and Mathematics. This figure dropped by 1.42 percentage points compared with the 2025 results.
A broader group of 1,687,378 candidates, or 86.50 per cent, achieved credits in five or more subjects with or without English and Mathematics. Among the 1.2 million who passed in English and Mathematics, 641,631, or 32.89 per cent, were female, while 558,883, or 28.65 per cent, were male.
Overall, females made up the larger share of participants, with 997,267 women (51.12 per cent) compared to 953,459 men (48.88 per cent). WAEC confirmed that 1,834,695 candidates, representing 94.05 per cent, had their results fully processed and released. The results of a further 116,031 candidates, or 5.95 per cent, were still being processed at the time of the announcement.
Special Needs Candidates and New Systems
The council also said 1,213 candidates with special needs sat the examination, among them 137 visually impaired candidates, 491 with hearing impairment, 55 who are spastic or mentally challenged, and 41 who are physically challenged.
WAEC said it rolled out several improvements for this cycle, including a Digital Examiner Mark System to speed up result processing, serialisation of question papers to reduce cheating, and a new portal through which candidates can generate e-PINs to check their results directly. A total of 102,708 examiners marked scripts across 88 venues nationwide.
Debts and Final Engagement
Dangut, who described Wednesday's briefing as his third and final engagement as head of the WAEC Nigeria National Office, warned that candidates sponsored by states owing outstanding fees to the council would not receive their results until those debts were settled.
