COMPUTER SELECTION BLUES (OCT 2)

WHEN, in 2005, the Ghana Education Service (GES) came up with the Computer Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) to replace the manual selection of Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates into senior high schools (SHSs), it was for good reasons.
First, the new system was meant to reduce to the barest minimum issues of corruption associated with the old system which allowed less qualified candidates to gain admission to the so-called endowed schools, at the expense of those who made the grades.
Second, the CSSPS was touted to reduce the drudgery of parents moving from one school to another in search of admission for their children, with its attendant frustrations and potential need to bribe one’s way.
We do concede the fact that in the first three years of the new system there were teething problems which were to be expected, given that the number of candidates involved, as against the limited vacancies in the various SHSs, made it impossible to place every qualified candidate in school.
But one would have thought that those teething problems would gradually be resolved, such that in the fifth year of the system, we will not be talking about problems of gargantuan proportions as we are confronted with this year.
Since the GES announced that parents and BECE candidates can check the schools to which the candidates have been posted on the Internet, the airwaves and newspapers have been inundated with one complaint or another, all bordering on the single fact that the system has failed to do justice to the candidates.
There are even complaints that candidates who obtained grade one in all 10 subjects did not get placed in their first-choice schools!
The GES has come out to explain that it used the raw scores of the candidates in the placement exercise, not the grades, and that the fact that a candidate obtained 10 grade ones does not mean his or her raw score will qualify him or her for placement in his or her first-choice school.
The allegations of corruption being bandied about by frustrated parents may have some merit if one considers that while some schools insist on 10 grade ones before one is given admission, it is common to meet candidates with aggregates 15 and more in those schools.
While we are at it, we would like to find out about the policy of allocating about 20 per cent of admissions to candidates from the communities where the schools are sited.
The DAILY GRAPHIC is of the view that that policy should not be jettisoned on the altar of expediency because in some areas families and communities had to sacrifice their farmlands, their sources of livelihood, for the schools to be constructed.
In such cases, it is not wrong to allocate places for indigenes of those communities who pass the BECE but who do not necessarily obtain 10 grade ones or so.
The Akans say “Akyea na emmui”, to wit, although it is bent, it is not yet broken. Therefore, the DAILY GRAPHIC thinks we can rescue the CSSPS if we rid it of the alleged corruption it is associated with to make it a very powerful tool to improve standards in education.