The 2019 WASSCE Exams, being administered to 39,800 12th graders, have started in earnest at 1:00 pm local time throughout Liberia today. These exams will be administered from April 24 to May 20, 2019 at 237 centers in the country.
The exams started with practical and physical Geography today and will end on Monday, May 20, with Chemistry. WAEC says objective test, essay, practice work, and oral examination will be used to evaluate candidates’ performance.
The West African Senior School Certificate Examination, or WASSCE for short, is administered in five West African Countries, including Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia, and The Gambia for senior high school students.
Reports from the various centers say examination materials dispatched to the various centers by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) Monrovia Office arrived at testing centers on time. A number of centers were visited in Monrovia today, and proof was seen that examination materials were available on time.
At Liberia’s first sitting in 2018, there was mass failure in the WASSCE exams. The exams were administered to over 33,979 candidates from 600 Senior High Schools across the country, and only 11,544 candidates, representing 33.85%, made a successful pass.
This bad result drew criticisms from across the country, prompting the Government to take steps this year to improve the passing score. The Ministry of Education recruited the cream of their teachers from across the country and assigned them to centers in each education district to tutor 12th graders for the exams in a special program.
The ministry developed modules from a blend of the national curriculum and subjects appearing in past exams, and these are the basis of the tutoring conducted on Saturdays from November 2018 to mid-April this year. Teachers who participated in the program were paid a weekly stipend.
In February this year, the District Education Officer of the Left Bank # 1A education district of Montserrado County, Rev Peter Knowlden, and his team were upbeat that the program will yield the desired results this year. Asked then if he thought the national score will improve from 33.85% to reach 50%, Rev. Knowlden ambitiously predicted that the national score will not be less than 80%.
Curbing Malpractices
Malpractices have in past exams been a challenge for the WAEC. The results of 855 out of a total 33,979 candidates, who wrote the WASSCE in 2018, were withheld by WAEC Liberia for alleged examination malpractices.
In a bid to curb this menace, Mr. Dale Gbotoe, Head of WAEC Monrovia Office, told reporters that mechanisms have been put in place effective this year’s WASSCE Exams. He further admonished the students to do independent work during the course of the examinations.
One of such malpractices is impersonation. WAEC is considering to include as part of the registration exercise for WASSCE candidates the fingerprinting of each registered candidate. This is to nip in the bud the growing trend of impersonation. WAEC hoped to get this done as from the 2019 examination candidates, but there is no evidence that this plan was effected for these ongoing exams.
Another action to be taken by WAEC to curb malpractices, as announced by WAEC, is to introduce closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, e-marking software. However, these seem to be for the future as their implementation is dependent on huge financial input.
CCTVs must be powered in order to work – by electric or by solar power. So many of the 237 centers where this year’s exams are being administered lack both electric or solar power. The Council will work towards achieving this because it says it will adopt the use of CCTV cameras in examination centers.
WAEC has also stated that it will introduce the application of modern techniques such as computer-based testing, e-marking software, among others, to curb examination malpractice.
We wish the students good luck on their exams.