WAEC Update by @eddybless

Introduction

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After along wait, Senior Secondary School final year students across West Africa have finally begun their May, June, certificate examinations. There West African Examination Council in a press release had hinted that the examination will be conducted in accordance to the COVID-19 guidelines.

They also added that social distancing was also a practice they are very familiar with and that they it will be their banging point to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

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The commission revealed that for Nigeria alone they are a total of 1,573,789 candidates who are expected to sit for the 2021 examinations and that they is provision for just 25,000 examination supervisors.

EXAMINATION MALPRACTICE

The examination council made know that in the quest to maintain excellence, they are all in to check malpractice.

Ahead of the examination, which started on the 6th of August 2019 the body had announced that they had put in place an inbuilt anti malpractice mechanism which the will be capable of fish out any special examination center where exams malpractice was commonly perpetrated.

Recall that in 2017 there West African Examination Council had announced a new software which they will be using to check examination malpractice.

They have announced that the software known as Item Differentia Profile (IDP) will fully be used in 2021 examination to fish out malpractice.
According to the commission, this system will check on cheating (copying) done on the objective type of paper, leaving a little work for the invigilator who just has monitor for malpractice on the essay type paper.

The Item Differentia Profile (IDP) is able to detect most of the cases of cheating(copying) and that the software has an automatic reporting tool which will report the defaulter through the charge sheet.

WAEC went on to announce that the any culprit caught shall be fined $610 i.e about 250,000 Naira for Nigerians.

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The council have also added that all candidates must have to use a biometric verification system to ensure that there is no impersonation.