Original research
The most repeated JAMB questions, counted properly
Everyone tells you JAMB repeats its questions. Almost nobody has checked. We ran the numbers across 14,495 real past questions in our own bank and found that about 8.1% of them, roughly one in 12, had already been asked in an earlier year with the same wording and the same four options.
How we counted
The claim that JAMB recycles its questions gets repeated on every forum and in every tutorial centre, usually with no evidence attached. We have 14,495 real past questions tagged by year, so we checked.
A question only counted as a repeat if two things were true. The wording had to match after normalising for punctuation and spacing, and all four options had to match too. That second condition matters. Without it the count balloons, because comprehension papers reuse stems like "which of the following is true according to the passage" every single year while the passage underneath changes completely. Those are not repeats, and we excluded them along with cloze questions that reference a numbered gap.
What survives that filter is a genuine repeat: the same question, the same options, sat by candidates in two or more different years.
The headline number
1,181 of 14,495 questions (8.1%) appear in more than one year. That is about one question in 12. In a 180 question paper, that arithmetic points to somewhere around fourteen questions you could have seen before.
The repeat rate for every subject
Repetition is not spread evenly. Some subjects recycle heavily, others barely at all.
| Subject | Questions checked | Repeat rate |
|---|---|---|
| Islamic Religious Studies | 632 | 21.4% |
| Physics | 1,172 | 13.9% |
| Commerce | 1,002 | 10.6% |
| Government | 1,070 | 9.7% |
| Financial Accounting | 1,123 | 8.3% |
| Mathematics | 940 | 8.1% |
| Economics | 1,054 | 7.8% |
| Geography | 1,003 | 7.8% |
| Use of English | 1,415 | 7.2% |
| Biology | 1,039 | 6.9% |
| Chemistry | 1,100 | 5.7% |
| Literature in English | 918 | 5.6% |
| Christian Religious Studies | 1,170 | 3.9% |
| History | 439 | 1.8% |
| Agricultural Science | 283 | 0.7% |
| Computer Studies | 135 | 0.0% |
Two things are worth reading off that table. The subjects at the top, Islamic Religious Studies and Physics, reward past-question practice more than any amount of textbook reading. The subjects at the bottom are partly a story about sample size, since Computer Studies and Agricultural Science are our smallest banks, so treat those rows as less reliable than the rest.
A high repeat rate is not a reason to memorise. It is a reason to trust that the examiners have a fixed set of ideas they care about, and that past papers are the shortest route to finding them.
Questions that came back three and four times
These are real examples from the bank, with the years each one appeared. You can check any of them yourself in the app.
| Question | Subject | Years it appeared |
|---|---|---|
| Assigning revenues to the accounting period in which goods were sold or services rendered and expenses in | Financial Accounting | 2009, 2010, 2015, 2025 |
| The process of energy production in the sun is | Physics | 2009, 2015, 2022 |
| What is the value of p if the gradient of the line joining (-1, p) and (p, 4) is 2/3? | Mathematics | 2009, 2019, 2020 |
| Determine the value of x for which (x 2 - 1) > 0 | Mathematics | 2009, 2010, 2021 |
| A man invested N5,000 for 9 months at 4%. What is the simple interest? | Mathematics | 2000, 2003, 2011 |
| An action in a play that stimulates the audience to pity a character is | Literature in English | 2014, 2015, 2018 |
| A poet's use of regular rhythm is known as | Literature in English | 2012, 2016, 2019 |
| The tragic character is the person whose experiences arouse pity and | Literature in English | 2003, 2015, 2016 |
Look at the year spreads. That Financial Accounting question ran in 2009, came back in 2010, again in 2015, and once more in 2025. A candidate who only worked the last two papers would have met none of them.
What this should change about your revision
Three practical consequences follow from the numbers.
- Cover ten years, not two. The repeats are spread across decades, not clustered in recent papers. Working 2025 and 2024 alone leaves most of the repetition untouched.
- Weight your practice by subject. If you are sitting Islamic Religious Studies or Physics, past questions are unusually high value. In Chemistry or Biology, where the rate is lower, past papers still teach you the style but you need the syllabus coverage behind it.
- Read the explanation even when a question looks familiar. Recognising a question you cannot actually solve is worth nothing in the hall. The repeat only helps if you understood it the first time.
And the obvious caution: about nine questions in ten are still new every year. Nobody passes JAMB on repeats alone. Repetition is a reason past questions work, not a shortcut around learning the material. If anyone offers to sell you next year's paper, that is a scam, and examination malpractice can get your result cancelled.
Working the repeats inside JAMB Pro
The bank these numbers come from is the same one inside the app, so you can work it directly:
- Past papers year by year, which is how you cover the decade the repeats are spread across. You can pause a paper and resume where you stopped.
- A written explanation under every answer, so a familiar question becomes one you can actually solve.
- Bookmarks for questions you want to return to.
- Progress tracking per subject, so you can put the hours into whichever one is weakest.
- Offline once a subject is downloaded, and free.
Work the papers the repeats come from
14,495+ real JAMB past questions across 16 subjects, every one with an explanation. Free, offline, no sign-up.
You can also try 16 real past questions, one from every subject, on our free practice page without installing anything.
Frequently asked
How many JAMB questions actually repeat?
In our own bank of 14,495 past questions, 1,181 of them, about 8.1%, appear again in a later year with the same wording and the same four options. That is roughly one question in 12.
Which subject repeats the most?
Islamic Religious Studies has the highest repeat rate in our bank at 21.4%, followed by Physics at 13.9% and Commerce at 10.6%. Computer Studies and Agricultural Science repeat least, though those are also our smallest banks.
Does this mean I can just memorise past questions?
No, and that is the wrong lesson to take from it. Around nine in ten questions are new each year. What repetition tells you is that the examiners keep returning to the same topics and the same ways of testing them, so working past papers trains you on the patterns rather than the individual questions.
How many years of past questions should I do?
At least ten per subject. Several questions in our bank turn up in three or four separate years spread across two decades, so a candidate who has only covered the last two papers will miss most of the repetition.