WAEC introduces ‘walk-in-registration’ for private candidates

 N’Assembly decries recurrent poor performance in exams

THE West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has introduced a new registration procedure intended for private candidates in the November/December 2014 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) who are unable to register during the normal registration period to register and sit for the examination as “walk-in-candidates.”

According to the Council, the registration will commence on Tuesday, August 26, 2014 and continue throughout the duration of the examination.

Head, National Office, WAEC, Mr. Charles Eguridu, said the procedure was designed to avail candidates the opportunity to amend for the courses they might have failed in their previous sittings and gain admission without losing any year.

Revealing this to journalists at the Council’s headquarters in Yaba, Lagos State yesterday, Eguridu said: “This innovation makes it possible for those who for one reason or the other were unable to register for the examination before the entry was closed to still have the opportunity available to them on the day of the examination. You will just walk to the designated centre, pay a fee of N25,000, they will capture your biometric data and you walk into the examination hall and write your examination.

“We are aware that there were quite a number of people who for reasons best known to them were unable to take advantage of the entry period to register for the examination, especially those who were unable to access their results of May/June 2014 WASSCE. We are aware that a number of states have not been able to access their results for reasons best known to them and candidates from such states may be disadvantaged.

“If for example a candidate wrote the 2014 May/June WASSCE and didn’t get credit in Mathematics and needed it to get admission, this facility will afford him the opportunity to sit and write for the exam and possibly gain admission next year instead of wasting another year to regularise his qualification.

“It is because WAEC has a human face, we are doing this as a result of appeals from concerned stakeholders, parents, teachers and even the government to make Nigerians realise that WAEC is candidate-friendly, and our mandate is to conduct examinations and we are doing this in the public interest.”

He, however, revealed that the facility is available for only candidates in cities and towns where the Council’s offices are located with exception of three states of the country - Adamawa, Yobe and Borno -after they have completed their registrations at any of the council’s zonal or branch office.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly has expressed concern over students’ poor performance in this year’s West African Examinations Council (WAEC) examinations.

The Chairman, House Committee on Education, Mr. Aminu Sulieman, who disclosed this while answering questions from journalists shortly after an oversight visit of members of the committee to the National Universities Commission (NUC) in Abuja, stated that the committee would investigate the mass failure of students in the exam.

He disclosed that the investigation process was critical to unfold reasons for this.

He said: “It is unfortunate, incidentally we will be visiting WAEC and it will form part of our engagement with them, but I want to believe that WAEC will not be held sorely responsible for this sad development. It is the responsibility of parents, teachers and the schools where those students were tutored and we want to go and interact with WAEC and hear from them what is actually responsible for this alarming rate of failure, which was put at about 38 percent.”

He opined that statistics of the results, which shows that over 68 percent of candidates that sat for the exam failed to achieve the minimum five credits with English and Mathematics was unacceptable for a country like Nigeria.

“As a country, this is unacceptable and I believe government has done the best it could and if there are areas of improvement we will try to encourage government to do the proper thing. And if it means sanitizing the entire community to help the Ministry of Education, we will do that for the interest of Nigerians.”

He also assured NUC of the committee’s support, advising it to pay more attention to key areas such as accreditation and research.

In his remarks earlier, Executive Secretary of the NUC, Professor Julius Okojie, stated that paucity of funds was affecting the performance of the commission.

He said the commission received only N35.7 million (27 per cent) out of the N130.44 million appropriated to it in the 2014 budget.

Represented by his deputy in charge of administration, Mr. Akinbode Agbaoye, Okojie said out of the N173.1 million capital budget for the year 2013, only N77.4 million representing 45 per cent was released to the commission.

He also explained that the commission had received the monthly allocations of January,

February, March, April and May this year, while that of June, July and August are still pending.

“Last year we also had a shortfall of N8.2 million in our overhead cost. The overhead cost we are receiving is not enough to cater for our needs because a single accreditation is costing the commission no less than N400 million.”

The NUC boss appealed for more money to fund the commission’s information technology project, saying, “we need more fund to pay for subscription and other related expenses.”

He urged the committee to assist the commission by enacting laws that will enable the NUC prosecute illegal institutions, saying, “because we don’t have power to prosecute such institutions they are now resurfacing.”

He said that NUC is spending much money to battle illegal universities, hence the need to have a law that will empower the commission to prosecute the defaulters of its laws.

Speaking on the council’s strategy in containing the spread of the deadly Ebola virus during the examinations, Eguridu disclosed that the Council has put measures in place to ensure that candidates are not exposed to the virus.

He said: “We appeal to sick candidates to avoid coming to the centre. While in the centre, all our supervisors and members of staff who will be involved in the conduct of the examination will be adequately equipped to deal with the situation. We have made provision for a wide-gap in the sitting arrangement in a manner that people will not be packed together. We have also made arrangement for sanitizers, hand-gloves and masks for our examiners. We are also partnering with various medical authorities to be on standby to address any emergency situation that may arise.

“We are aware that in some other countries, their examinations have been put on hold, but in Nigeria, I want to congratulate the government for their proactive measures to stem the spread of this virus and we want to assure you that we will never do anything to endanger our candidates.”

Tweet