An educationist and founder of Phidel Group of Schools, Pastor Ayodele Adelusi, has criticised the new rule by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) requiring all secondary schools wishing to conduct computer-based tests (CBT) for its examinations to have at least 250 computers.

Adelusi lamented that asking school proprietors to provide between 250 and 300 computers just to obtain hosting rights for the Senior Secondary School Certificate Exams (SSCE) would create confusion, especially as school owners have less than one year to comply.

“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 SSCE. 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 could cause problems, citing the previous Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) incident where students wrote in darkness due to power failure. “Asking schools to acquire about 300 laptops, create a CBT centre, and implement all of these in less than a year before the next WAEC exams is not good at all,” he said.

Adelusi described the directive as a “fire brigade approach” that would achieve little unless WAEC or the government convenes a stakeholders’ meeting to obtain contributions from different quarters and design a workable policy.

“This is a fire brigade approach. It is not done anywhere in the world. WAEC needs feedback from school owners, who will tell them that it is a waste of scarce resources for a school with only 50 students to procure up to 250 computers. You cannot issue such a directive and expect it to be carried out in less than a year. At least three years should have been given to allow schools sufficient preparation time,” he stated.

He therefore pleaded with WAEC to extend the compliance period to at least three years and to limit the number of computers to match the number of students taking the exams in a particular school.

Adelusi also decried the high cost of running private schools in Nigeria and urged the government to grant tax incentives. “That way, school owners can remain in business. Many private schools have shut down in the past two to three years because owners could no longer cope with financial burdens. Private schools should be tax-free; that’s how it is done in advanced countries,” he said.

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