The serialization of a few chosen questions in the 2023 West African Senior High School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) has been officially confirmed by the West African Examination Council (WAEC).
The council claims the move is intended to stop cheating during exams.
Due to the serialization process, each candidate in a given hall must receive the same question, but with a different question number.
Speaking to the media, the Council’s Head of Public Affairs, John Kapi, declared that, the chosen topics will be serialized because they cannot be compromised.
“Serialisation is not anything that is landing from space. Besides nothing has changed about the structure of the questions. It is just that we have serialised some of them. It is our trade secret, and we want to maintain that. We are not unduly punishing anybody, it is the same question just that there is some serialisation. There are some of these papers that are high stake and so for those high stake papers we would want to serialise them.”
“Secondly it is a very expensive venture to get into, it is time-consuming and all of that. And so we concentrate more on the high stake papers and then there are a few of them that we consider as low risk, and so we don’t serialize those ones,” he said.
This year’s WASSCE is expected to draw 447,204 candidates from 975 different schools in the country.
