Edidiong Udobuia
A briefing from the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) 2025 for principals, supervisors and examination officers, contains the following resolutions;
1. Pen and paper WASSCE examinations will stop in the year 2025. This means that this year is the last examination involving pen and paper;
2. 2026 WASSCE will be computer-based;
3. School centres will no longer exist, but examination centres, just like JAMB centres as directed by the Minister of Education;
4. There are customized papers, and no two students answer the same questions in the same subject;
5. Any school penalised by any examination body will be penalised by all the other examination bodies;
6. Where a candidate did not have a customized question paper, he or she should not use the customized OMR sheet. He/She will be provided with a dummy question paper;
7. Once a candidate is caught in examination malpractice during any of the papers, automatically all the papers of the candidate will be withheld;
8. Principals are the chief security and custodians of the examination in the school;
9. The punishment for examination malpractice is cancellation of the entire result;
10. Principals should ensure that examinations are hitch-free;
11. Mark and attendance sheets will no longer be in existence as soon as computer-based examination (CBE) commences.
We will come back to these resolutions, but first, let me share a little story about a young girl called Magdalene.
Magdalene was 17 years old when she came to live with us last year following the birth of Ediyanga-Abasi. She had just written her WAEC earlier in the year so the initial agreement with her parents was for us to help her learn a skill after a while and we were fine with it. But barely a few weeks living with us, we noticed how intelligent and smart she was especially whenever she was helping Edidiong-Abasi with his homework. So, early this year, my wife and I started mulling over the idea of registering her for JAMB. Thankfully, the opportunity came and we got her registered. To help her prepare for the exams, my wife got JAMB past questions for her to practice. But surprisingly, she did really poorly during the practices and it got us worried. We decided to pay and enrol her in a JAMB preparatory class at Uncle Jay’s JAMB Lesson. She had no previous knowledge of computer usage so we also registered her for CBT lessons.
A few things to point out. First, by the time we decided to register her for JAMB, the preparatory classes had gone very far so she was the last person to join the classes and it was just about two weeks to the examination. Secondly, because of the nature of the arrangements, she could not attend the lessons everyday. Despite all of these, Magdalene wrote the exam and had a 200+ score. Imagine if she had more time to prepare, we’ll probably be talking about nearly a 300 or above score. Nevertheless, for someone who picked education related courses as her preferred choices, Magdalene is now one step closer to getting a university education.
If we consider Magdalene as an experiment, then we can draw a few conclusions.
1) There are so many brilliant children who have been denied the opportunity to further their education because they have not had the right preparation.
2) The “right preparation” requires the interest and involvement of three factors – the child, the sponsor (parents, guidance), and the system (teachers, tutors, exam bodies, facilities).
3) With the increasing digitalisation of certificate examinations, if the “right preparation” is not normalised, the rate of educationally deprived children will keep increasing.
The third conclusion is where the real danger is. Apart from being a requirement for admission into tertiary institution, I don’t know what else JAMB result is used for. Having been in the public school system for about 9 years now, I can categorically say that a very significant number of students in the graduating class (SS3) do not take part in JAMB (with particular reference to public schools). Let’s do a simple maths. In 2025, about 1.9million candidates registered for WAEC. It can easily be assumed that about 90% or more of this number are candidates who are presently in the graduating class. Elsewhere, in 2025, about 2million candidates registered for JAMB. I may not be very wrong to assume that this number is almost evenly shared between first-time candidates and old candidates. And among the first-time candidates, there are those who have stayed home for a year or more since they left secondary school. In the end, those who are presently in the graduating class and took part in JAMB exam will make up a paltry 30% or even less of the total number.
Now, in one hand, we have JAMB, an optional examination, still grappling with hitches, inadequacies and other critical issues after many years of adopting CBT. On the other hand, we have WASSCE, a mandatory certificate examination, about to adopt CBT for candidates where a significant number have no basic computer knowledge. The summary of the 11-point resolution by WASSCE is that CBT will be fully implemented in 2026 with corresponding strict measures to guard against malpractice. But nothing seems to be said about the plans or ongoing collaborations between the examination body, the government and schools towards setting-up modalities that will give every candidate equal opportunity to prepare for the exams considering the significance of this examination to the students.
With many public schools unable to provide practical computer learning for their students due to factors like theft, vandalism, insecurity, outright administrative negligence and failure, etc, the big questions are, how prepared are these students for 2026? What effective interventions can be provided within the next few months to help the students prepare? Two weeks ago, I asked one of my students in SS2 why she did not indicate interest to serve as a School Prefect. I know she’s intelligent and smart enough to be considered for a post. She simply told me that she was not interested because she wants to focus on preparing for their upcoming external examination as well as WAEC so she would pass well and be able to gain admission into the university immediately. In this public school system, there are not many students who are very intentional about tertiary education. I am really concerned about a child like this failing to achieve her dream just because the system is intentionally or unintentionally rigged against her. So, how can we help these children prepare for what is coming because the conversations we’ve had this year about JAMB were unbelievable, but it will be very catastrophic to have the same or similar conversation about WAEC in 2026?
