WAEC Has Eradicated ‘Awaiting Result’ – Adenipekun

Dec 07, 2017  WAEC Result


Mr. Olu Adenipekun is the Head of National Office (HNO) of the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC).  In this interactive session with select newsmen in Katsina State, he spoke on the just released 2017 private candidates’ examination, issues surrounding the conduct of public examinations, strategies to suppress the menace of examination malpractice and offered explanations on the background to the introduction of the second diet. Oyeniran Apata who was part of the team presents excerpts of the interview.

The downward slide in the performance of the just-released West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for private candidates from 38.50 per cent in 2016 to 26.10 in 2017 has given cause for concern on the performance of students, what is responsible for this?
Recall that In 2015 the percentage of candidates that made five credits including English Language and Mathematics was 28.59 per cent.

In 2016 it was 38.50 per cent and in 2017 it is 26.01 per cent. One is, therefore, encouraged to compare the performances of candidates for the periods. You will observe that the performance of candidates in 2015 and 2017 was quite comparable.

One was 28.59m, while the other was 6.10 per cent. That of last years it was 38.50 per cent and would have expected that it would about 37 per cent of more to give room for comparison.

At the end of the 2017 examination, the computation of the result was the figure we have released to the public and a lot of reasons could be adduced. Though we have not carried out any scientific investigation to unravel what went wrong or happened. Like I have always said whenever we discuss issues relating to private candidates’ examination that just comparing the number of candidates that secured five credits including English language and Mathematics will never give a true picture of actual performance as we expect.

Parts of the reasons are not far-fetched. For the private candidates’ examination, many of the candidates wrote the examination to make up for shortcomings or deficiencies that might have been observed in the previous examination particularly the school examination. For such candidates, for instance, he or she might have secured six credits with less than C6 in Mathematics.

As far as a JAMB candidate is concerned he cannot proceed with tertiary education even with six credits without credits in the requisite subjects for admission. The minimum requirement for admission is five credits with English language and Mathematics. If that candidate should register for WASSCE for the private candidate in six or eight subjects, the major interest of such candidates is to make a minimum of credit pass in Mathematics. For such candidate that falls into this category that needed three or two credits in the examination including mathematics as their targets. As far as the candidates in these categories are concerned the examination is a success.

From that point, the candidate can now proceed further to seek for higher education having make up for the requisite papers for admission. Thus, if you are looking at the percentage of candidates that made five credits including English language and Mathematics as far as the private candidates’ examination is concerned then we may not be able to really measure the true performances of candidates in the examination.

But for the school examination, we know that many of the candidates for this examination are those that are having a first feel of external examination and their determination is to make the required number of credits in critical and subjects that are relevant to their expiration to gain admission for higher education.
For them, five credits pass including English language and Mathematics is very important. If they get it they can proceed otherwise they may have to make another attempt in order to proceed with higher education.

The percentage this year is lower but let me draw your attention to the fact that the percentage or number of candidates that made five credits and above including English language and Mathematics in the school candidates was much higher.

The number of candidates that will actually obtain credits passes including English language and Mathematics will be lower for the private candidates’ examination. That may also be one of the reasons but we will subject it to further scientific investigations otherwise we may not be able to get the true picture.
What are some of the new strategies WAEC has evolved for next examination considering the number of candidates whose results are withheld in the private candidates’ examination?

For WAEC to remain on top of the situation and for us to remain at the forefront as far as the conduct of public examinations is concerned in this part of the world it is required of us to come up with new strategies; new strategies that would represent an improvement of what we did yesterday such that our delivery tomorrow would be adjudged as better than our delivery today.

So, this had been one of the focus and concern of the current management of WAEC. Just as we are announcing this result that took place on October 5, the number of days between when the examination was concluded and the release of results is not up to 50 days.
This will tell you that we have also introduced certain strategies that have allowed us to further reduce the number of days candidates would have to wait to receive their results. We have not gotten to where we are going yet.

We must continually work harder to reduce the waiting period for our examination until we get to that time when can say we are satisfied and can tell the world that we are serving our children better than we served them yesterday.
There are a lot of improvements and strategies that we have brought to bear on our processes and procedures that are tailored made towards delivering on our mandate better than what we achieved and did yesterday.

But, when we look at the area of examination malpractices, of course, you will agree with me that during the international summit on examination malpractice in Lagos recently, you would observe that WAEC is really working hard to evolve new strategies and deployment of technology to take the fight against examination malpractice to the doorsteps of the perpetrator of this acts.

We have introduced what we call Item Differential Profile. Item Differential Profile is a computer programming that will enable the council to monitor and compare the performances of each of the candidates in each of the schools and examination centres in their responses to our own examination questions.
The analysis from the differential profiling will clearly reveal to us what took place in the examination halls even when we were not there physically. That will lead us to further investigations as to what happened or what did not happen as far examination malpractice is concerned.

We are improving on the technology deployed for the examination. We are upgrading to real-time-online. Those intercom devices should be able to give us certain information that we can probe and investigate to confirm or disprove certain occurrences in the conduct of our examinations. It will also enable us to monitor the movement of our examination officials and supervisors.
Is there any relationship with an early release of results and admission of candidates for tertiary admission?

We are proud of where we are now. Nigerians are happy when we released the results of WASSCE for school candidates in July. Many candidates were able to upload their results and use it for admission purposes.
The issue of awaiting results has been completely removed as far WASSCE examination is concerned. There is a good synergy between WAEC and other examination bodies. We will up our ante and improve the overall conduct of the examinations.

It is has been observed that the number of enrollment for the private candidates’ examination has not increased to justify the introduction of another diet?
WAEC examines about 1.8 to two million candidates each year.

The greater number of these candidates is in the school examination diet. For us, we are suspicious that many of the candidates that are presented by schools are actually not the school candidates. They are not candidates that had been in such schools for six years or for three years of secondary school education. Rather, they are students categorised as external candidates.
The second diet of WASSCE for private candidates is always targeted at those candidates such that they can be discouraged from going after the school candidates’ diet.

By and large, the number of candidates’ for WAEC test in a year would still be in the region of 1.8 or 2million. What we have done is a mere redistribution of the candidates by reducing the pressure on the school candidate examination to a manageable size.
We expect that the candidature of the private candidates’ examination will align with the available spaces and our capacity will also serve the candidates better and by extension serve Nigeria better.


Source: IndependentNg

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