WAEC: Result Errors Delay Naming of Highest Scorer

Moshood Karim with Agency Report West African Examination Council (WAEC) has said that the body was yet to select the best candidate for the just released results of the 2016 examinations. The spokesman of WAEC, Mr Demianus Ojijeogu, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Aba, Abia state, that the results would be consolidated before the highest scorers would be named and rewarded. NAN reports that some candidates who had As in all nine subjects they sat for have been named in the social media as the highest scorers since the partial release of the results. “The ranking which has made some students the highest scorers in the last WAEC/SSCE examinations did not emanate from us. “There were some mistakes in some candidates’ results. So we have pending results yet to be released. We are already working on them so that we can resolve the queries on them. “Some of them were caused by errors from candidates while they were registering. When we resolve the queries, we then release the results”, he said. “We also have withheld results because of malpractice. We have reports from exam halls from our staff who were on inspection, our supervisors, independent monitors who sent in reports. We also got reports of malpractice from our marking venues, some of the examiners who marked the scripts also gave reports of some candidates copying each other, for instance in spelling, in a centre, over 20 to 40 candidates made the same mistake of misspelling “through”, how can that be? He asked. He said that when the investigations have been concluded with enough proof of cheating, then the results would be forwarded to the Nigerian Examinations Committee for their final verdict on them. Ojijiogu said that based on committee’s decision during their meeting which holds every November in a selected state, the pending results would either be cancelled or released. “So since the results have not been consolidated, we would not say that this person had the best result because somebody whose result is pending can still perform better than somebody who result has been released”, he said He said that the highest scorers, male and female are later named and given awards in the following year during the meeting of the committee.