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By Sunday Ani
An educationist and founder of Phidel Group of Schools, Pastor Ayodele Adelusi has faulted the new rule by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) that all secondary schools wishing to conduct a computer based test (CBT) of its examinations must have at least 250 computers.
Adelusi lamented that asking school proprietors to provide between 250 and 300 computers just so that WAEC can grant a hosting right to such schools to write the computer based test of the Senior Secondary School Certificate Exams is going to cause a lot of confusion, especially considering that schools owners have less than one year to do that.
“WAEC said If you want to run a CBT in your school, you must have at least 250 students.
“It is not every school that has up to 250 students, who will write the WAEC-organised SSCR.
“So, of what importance is that? Why can’t we do it according to the number of students each school has.
“Every school should be able to work according to the number of students it has; that’s what I think,” he said.
He warned that the new directive will bring confusion into the organisation of the exams. ‘This new order will lead to problems, like no light as it happened during the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exams (UTME) in one of the school’s where students wrote in darkness.
“Asking schools to go and get about 300 laptops, create a place for the CBT as centre and implement all of these in less than a year before the next WAEC exams is not good at all,” he said.
He insisted that the directive is a fire brigade approach that would amount to nothing, advising that if such a policy must succeed, the government or WAEC needs to call a Stakeholders’ meeting to get contributions from different quarters, so that at the end of the day, it can come up with the best idea on how to go about implementing such a policy.
“This is a fire brigade approach. It is not done anywhere in the world. WAEC needs to get feedback from the school owners, who I am sure will tell WAEC that it will be a waste of scarce resources for a school that has only about 50 students to go and procure up to 250 computers.
“Besides, you don’t give such a short period of time for people to carry out such a directive. At least, a period of three years or more should have been given so that every school will have enough time to prepare for that.
“You don’t wake up and issue such a directive and expect it to be carried out in less than one year. It will be tough,” he stated.
He, therefore, pleaded with WAEC to extend the period to at least three years. He also wants WAEC to limit the number of computers to the number of students taking the exams in a particular school.
He equally decried the high cost of running private schools currently in Nigeria and urged the government to give free tax incentives to private school owners in Nigeria.
“That way, school owners can remain in business. If you check in the last two or three years, many private schools have shut down because the owner can no longer cope with the financial burdens of running a private school. Private schools should be tax free; that’s how it is done in the advanced countries,” he said.
