WAEC ‘perfecting migration to Computer-based exams’

The West African Examinations
Council (WAEC) on Tuesday said it was perfecting plans to migrate to the Computer Based
Test (CBT) mode for its examinations.
The Registrar of
council, Iyi Uwadiae, disclosed
this in an interview with the
News Agency of
Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
According to him,
the council is
considering all variables available
to ensure that the
entire process is not messed up.
He, however, noted that the
council was not in a hurry to migrate
because the council basically
conducts achievement tests
and not selection tests.
“We have looked at the issue of CBT
and found that this is not a selection
test, where one can deal with paper and pencil. “With that, you can
easily migrate to CBT, but for an
achievement test where you train
people to become engineers, medical doctors and others,
there will be need for practical
experience.

“So, they do not just train them
practically in the class, they equally
need to be tested on theory.
“Against this background,
therefore, we are collaborating with
other examination bodies and experts outside Nigeria to
ensure that when we start,
we will not mess up the
entire process. “And what is expected of the candidates can still be achieved,’’ he said.

Mr. Uwadiae noted that the
council was being cautious
in getting it done because
there were many things
involved. “We are not in a hurry to
move in there but with time, we are going to migrate into it and start
with the objective tests.
“We have to still do the
practical aspect because we
want to be sure that all schools are on the same level.
“They must be on the same
level in terms of learning
and all other aspects so that
we can be able to have
confidence on the reliability
of the continuous assessment and practicals, which their teachers will
give us.
“For now, we cannot say
what we get from these
teachers are reliable as we
insist on continuous assessment.
“We need to go to these
schools and match them
against any standard tests,’’
the registrar said.
On the persistent poor
performance of candidates,
Uwadiae said the issue was
not peculiar to Nigeria
alone. He noted that effective
teaching and learning were
no longer taking place in
schools, coupled with the
issue of dearth of infrastructure.
According to him, students
seldom stay in the classrooms; they spend more time on the internet
and do not read and all that.
He explained that such
students were not expected
to perform miracles during
examinations.
“We compare our standards
with that of other examination bodies in Nigeria and internationally
and so we cannot lower our
standards.
“Our examinations are
taken by candidates of five
different countries and it is
the same examination.
“We have our own internal
mechanism, as well as a
very functional research
outfit.
“For every examination, we
do a research to find out
why candidates perform
poorly and if after this, we
still have some doubts, we
do what is called post item
analysis. “Invariably we find out that
our items are not bad.
“The teachers are the ones
who set the questions,
moderate and mark them;
we only collate and release
results as adjudged by the
experts,’’ the council boss
added.