WAEC scraps 30 minutes grace period for examination candidates

The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has scrapped the 30 minutes grace period given to candidates who report late to examination halls.

The new policy applies to all examinations organised by the council, including the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).

The Head of Public Affairs of WAEC, Mrs Agnes Teye-Cudjoe, who made this known to the Junior Graphic, noted that the decision was part of the drastic measures taken by WAEC to deal with examination leaks in the country.

She was responding to questions as to what was responsible for the successful and smooth conduct of this year’s BECE, in the wake of the leaks and cancellation of five papers in the BECE, as well as the leaks of some May-June WASSCE papers, last year. 

“We have asked candidates to be seated by 8:30 a.m. and so at 9 a.m. no candidate who is late will be admitted into the examination hall. 

“In the past, candidates had a 30 minutes grace period to enter the examination hall while the paper was going on, but now after 9 a.m. we are not going to admit any candidate who is late into the examination hall because that is when they hang around waiting for things which fly around and all that,” she said, adding that “the policy has come to stay”. 

Moreover, she said, the clamp down on 10 websites responsible for the leaking of examination questions played a major role in ensuring the smooth conduct of this year’s examination.

“The clamping down on rogue websites also helped a lot because these were the websites that were used to facilitate the leaking of some questions,” she said. 

Also, she said, the strict directive to supervisors and invigilators not to send mobile phones to examination centres played a big role in the smooth conduct of the examination, adding, “When these mobile phones are sent to the centres, that is when they perpetrate all those illegal things.” 

Index number mix up won’t affect results

Meanwhile, WAEC has pointed out that it is not responsible for the mix up in the index numbers of some candidates who wrote this year’s BECE. 

It said heads of schools should be blamed for the problem, since they registered the candidates and issued the index numbers for the examination.

“The index numbers which were given by the schools for the candidates to use during their mock exams were different from what they uploaded onto our system. That is where the mix up came from.   

“The schools do everything and they download it onto our site, which we also download and use. It is the information that they give us that we work with,”  Mrs Teye-Cudjoe said.

She said supervisors had, however, been asked to allow candidates to use the WAEC index numbers to write the examination. 

Supervisors were also asked to write and attach reports to the scripts of candidates that had that problem. 

That situation did not warrant any candidate to be prevented from writing the examination, since it was not their fault that the mix up came, she said. 

At the beginning of the BECE, some candidates across the country were said to have had problems locating their seats in the examination halls as a result of a mix up in their index numbers.