will inaugurate from this November/December
West African Senior School Certificate
Examinations, "branded, non-programmable
calculators and mathematical sets" for all its
examinations.
The initiative, the Council said, was to check
the increasing use of "programmable
calculators" by candidates during
examinations.
The council conducts the May/June and
November/December West African Senior
School Certificate Examinations.
The Council made this known in a
communiqué signed by its Head of Public
Affairs Department in Yaba, Lagos, Mr. Yusuf
Ari.
According to Ari, the decision is one of the
resolutions taken at the Nigeria Examinations
Committee of the Council at its 57th meeting
in Lagos. The committee is the highest
decision-making organ of WAEC on
examination-related matters in Nigeria.
Part of the communiqué read, "In view of the
noticeable increase in the use of
programmable calculators by candidates
during examinations, in contravention of the
rules and regulations guiding the conduct of
its examinations, the Committee mandated the
Council to introduce WAEC-branded, non-
programmable calculators, and mathematical
sets for use by candidates, with effect from
November/December 2014 WASSCE."
The Committee, which also expressed concern
that Nigerian candidates had won only a few
of the international awards given under the
aegis of the WAEC Endowment Fund in recent
years, however, blamed the poor outings on
what it called "the lack of essential inputs."
The international awards are for candidates
that posted outstanding performance in the
Council's examinations.
The communiqué added, "The unimpressive
performance of Nigerian candidates at the sub
regional level, the Committee believed, was
due to lack of essential inputs – human,
material and otherwise – required to drive a
sound educational system and the lack of
continuity in the system."
To alter the situation, the committee has
urged the federal and state governments, as
well as other education stakeholders to
articulate policies and programmes that would
help improve the standard of education in the
country.
It recommended, among others, the provision
of appropriate work force, adequate
infrastructure and teaching aids, saying these
would facilitate proper teaching and learning
to prepare adequately pupils for WAEC
examinations.
The Committee also identified inadequate
preparation and rote memorisation, illegible
handwriting, poor choice of questions, failure
to answer the required number of questions,
vague or irrelevant answers, and inadequate
division of time between questions, as some
of the problems that cause candidates' poor
performance in WASSCE.
Others are grammar and spelling errors,
misinterpretation of the demands of the
questions and difficulty in framing their
responses due to poor command of the
English Language.
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