Editorial Opinion
WAEC’s Ineptitude On Release of Results, Students Expectations
The recent issues of technical glitches that arose from the last West African Examinations Council, WAEC, examinations and the challenges of students who write the examination under darkness across rural communities in Nigeria is enough for the Federal Government to take a holistic review of the entire process of writing examinations under the Computer Based Test, CBT.
Candidates who have previously checked their results are advised to re-check after 24 hours. The directive was issued on Thursday via a statement released by the Council’s spokesperson, Mrs. Moyosola Adesina, amid growing concerns over the accuracy of the recently published results.
Under the stress of students writing examinations under unusual hours, the quality of the results released by WAEC will be a reflection of the percentage of students that will excel in the examination.
WAEC had announced that only 38.32% of the 1,969,313 candidates who sat for the exams obtained credit passes in five core subjects including English Language and Mathematics – this represents a staggering 33.8% drop from the 72.12% recorded in the previous year.
There are cases of students who had written the London Cambridge examination and have excelled but only for them to record F9 results in English language and other subjects in the recently concluded WAEC examination! So, how will WAEC address the disparity of the quality of results that these students obtained in the London Cambridge examination and the results released by WAEC?
Directing students to recheck their results on their portal by WAEC puts students in a lot of stress and anxiety.
• Will WAEC adjust the results of students who scored below F9 to A2 or across all subjects that they wrote in the examination?
• How will WAEC treat the results of brilliant students who scored F9 in a subject?
• What should Students expect from WAEC amid growing concerns over the accuracy of the recently published results that may have been adjusted by her?
With the growing national condemnation of the management of the examinations by WAEC, and the subsequent release of the results by parents and school institutions, WAEC may just be awarding lazy students with excellent results! This should never be the case – this will further demoralize brilliant students.
The replacement of manually writing examinations and replacing it with CBT examination process has robbed students of the opportunity to display their intellectual capacity on the subjects that they write as guess-work CBT-objective process.
The way forward is for WAEC to reboot and review her entire examination processes with a view to make students who write her examination to have confidence in the scoring of their subjects in the CBT-driven examination process.
The Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, should lead a process to deliberately review the conduct and management of future WAEC examinations, especially to avoid the recent glitches that may have developed from her portal on the release of examination results.
July 8, 2025