LET'S TREAD CAUTIOUSLY

THE West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has phased out the manual registration of candidates for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).
Indeed, the candidates for this year’s BECE, to be written in April, were all registered via the electronic system throughout the country.
The Head of the National Examination Administration Department of WAEC, Mr Kweku Nyamekye-Aidoo, explaining the process of computer registration, which he also described as “batch registration”, indicated its advantages over the manual system of registration.
While the DAILY GRAPHIC welcomes this new development in the administration of examinations at the basic education level, it is of the opinion that WAEC must tread cautiously so that the new system does not create more problems than the system it has come to replace.
We agree with WAEC in trying to solve some of the problems associated with the manual system of registration, especially the errors that were associated with that system. We also welcome the new system inasmuch as it will reduce paper work and make the registration process more efficient.
It is also common knowledge that when the registration was done manually, candidates made errors in the way they shaded the forms, creating a myriad of problems later when selection of candidates for senior high schools came.
It is good that Ghana, as part of the global village which the world has now become, also swims with the current and does things the way they are done elsewhere, so that we do not become Rip Van Winkles.
However, even as we strive to move with the times, we must also take our circumstances into consideration, so that at the end of the day we do not put any sections of our people into disadvantage because they do not have what it takes to be part of the current trend.
In other words, even though the DAILY GRAPHIC appreciates the movement by WAEC towards modernity and technology, that movement must be such that it does not create any undue problem for schools which do not have what it takes to come on board.
There is no denying the fact that many of the schools in the rural areas do not have electricity, so they cannot use computers (that is, even if they have them) to carry out the registration on computer. If the arrangement is that schools without computers (and there should be many of them) should go to nearby senior high schools and district assembly offices to use the computers there, then the question we ask is: Who foots the transportation bills of those schools?
If one considers the endemic poverty in some of our rural communities, parents who are called upon to transport their children elsewhere to be registered would be burdened unnecessarily and we find this unacceptable.
We also entertain the fear that some unscrupulous heads of junior high schools in the rural areas may take advantage of ignorant parents and pupils to dupe them.
That is why the DAILY GRAPHIC would like to counsel WAEC to do the phasing out gradually, just the way the junior secondary school system started in the early 1980s at places like Kinbu, Winneba, Oda, etc.
There should also be a lot of sensitisation along with the phasing out, so that stakeholders at the basic level of education — parents, pupils, school management committees, heads of schools — will gradually imbibe what it takes and be prepared to go along with the process.
We also call on the government to use the introduction of the computer registration exercise as an impetus to speed up the computerisation of all schools, since the need for computers in basic schools now has become imperative. The policy of providing schools with computers and connecting them to the Internet should be hastened, now that the schools need the computers to register their BECE candidates.