The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has in a press release from its headquarters in Accra, Ghana highlighted a number of concerns in relation to the ongoing West African Senior School Certificate Examination or WASSCE in the various countries in the region.
The Council was particularly concerned about what it says was the unfortunate circulation of a yet to be finalized version of an Examiners’ List for this year’s exams on social media.
“The Council has initiated investigations into the disturbing development and reported the matter to the Cyber Crime Department of the Ghana Police Service”, the statement reads.
The Council unreservedly apologized to all those Examiners whose contact details it says were inadvertently circulated in the public domain and emphasized its commitment to safeguarding “the integrity and credibility of its examinations and certificates respectively”.
WAEC says it was aware of several other unhealthy developments such as the snapshots of the Mathematics (Core) 2 paper that were posted on social media platforms after the paper left WAEC Strong Rooms, for which it admits of ongoing investigations.
The Council further acknowledges the prevalence of what it says are the activities of rogue websites with several fake versions of questions being circulated on social media platforms of subjects like Integrated Science (2&1), Social Studies (2&1), Chemistry (3), Practical Alternative A, and Economics (2&1).
The exams body has given the assurance that it will continue to roll out various measures to deal with these illegal activities so as to ensure fairness and preserve the integrity of the examination.
The Council in its bid to assuage the fears of the public, highlighted a number of measures that it says are contained in its marking process such as exclusion of school names on script envelopes, swapping of scripts across regions and the vetting of marked scripts that involve various layers of authority, including Team Leaders, Chief Examiners, Venue Co-ordinators and Subject Officers.
The senior school certificate exams started on Monday 17th august.
In Sierra Leone the authorities are also monitoring it over a longstanding concern of malpractice. Prior to the commencement of the exams, the education authorities engaged school authorities as part of efforts to prevent malpractice.
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