It is good news for many admission seekers who may be awaiting the release of their senior school certificate examination (SSCE) results as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) will on Monday (November 22, 2021) announce the release of the long awaited results.
The Head of Nigeria’s office (HNO) of the regional examination body, Patrick Areghan, who spoke in an exclusive telephone conversation with our reporter on Sunday, said a briefing to announce the release of the results would hold by 12 noon on Monday.
Mr Areghan cited various challenges including the stay-at-home-order in the South-east as part of the reasons for the seeming delay in the release of the results.
He said: “We are all in Nigeria and we know what has been happening. We only finished the examination in October and the sit-at-home-order in the South-east didn’t help matters.
“We lost a whole week during the marking because every Monday is shut down. As I am talking to you this evening and on a Sunday, I am just leaving the office. But I can assure you that the result will be released tomorrow (Monday). The spokesperson must have reached out.”
Anticipation
Many candidates, especially those who indicated in their Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) that they were awaiting their SSCE result, have anticipated the release of the results in the past few weeks.
The situation is further aggravated by the decision of some of the institutions to combine admission of candidates for both 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 academic calendar.
For instance, at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, where such combined admission system is adopted, candidates were given a particular time to upload their SSCE results on the portal of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) to be qualified for admission into the institution.
According to an insider, the university was not unaware that WAEC was yet to release its results, saying the decision was part of a screening method.
“The university had chosen more than 70 per cent of the applicants needed among those who sat the UTME in 2020 and so it could only accommodate about 30 per cent of its quota among those that sat the 2021 UTME. So the late release of the result by WAEC was a good opportunity to weed out some applicants,” the source explained.
The situation is the same across other institutions, as many parents have continued to besiege the WAEC head office in Yaba, Lagos, to inquire on the release of the results of their wards.
Marking of scripts still ongoing
Meanwhile, investigations by PREMIUM TIMES have indicated that results of some subjects for many candidates may not be released along with others when the announcement is made on Monday.
Reliable sources have confirmed to this newspaper that subjects such as Accounting and Agricultural Science were still being cross checked by “checkers” on Sunday.
But the examination body could not confirm this development on Sunday night.
However, a source, who is familiar with the development, said the delay was in connection with the new electronic marking system introduced by the examination body.
“The e-marking hasn’t been easy for subjects such as Accounting. This may also be because this is a new system, so markers are yet to get accustomed to it. We still had about 41,000 of scripts for agriculture that had not been checked as of last week. And as of today, we had about 300 scripts for Accounting that were yet to be checked,” another source, who did not want to be quoted, said.