Council had taken the decision in 2003 to implement it.
It sought to improve the manual system of selection and placement of qualified BECE candidates into public and private SHSs, TIs and vocational schools by replacing the manual system with a computerised one.
Prior to the introduction of the CSSPS, the placement of BECE candidates in SHSs was done manually. It was a rather laborious task involving heads of SHSs gathering at regional conferences to go through the results of individual candidates, as presented by WAEC and their basic schools, and hand-picking student performance cards and communicating the feedback to parents, usually through school notice boards.
To find out if a candidate had been placed, the candidate or his parents had to personally visit the school of his or her first, second or third choice to find the candidate’s name on the notice board.
Experts observed that the manual system had some weaknesses, including school heads taking too long a time to select students by performance, the difficulty of school heads giving equal attention to all candidates at the same time, rising cases of favouritism on the grounds of ‘old boyism, old girlism’, among others, rather than on performance or merit.
The computerised system
The CSSPS has established a procedure for candidates to follow in selecting their schools. WAEC marks the scripts of candidates and grades them by subjects, after which candidates’ results are offloaded to the CSSPS.
The CSSPS then reviews all results, using its inherent procedures for quality assurance.
The process of quality checks of the CSSPS includes ensuring that students are identified by their index numbers and gender. It also ensures that schools match the categories or options selected by candidates for placement.
The CSSPS uses the raw scores of candidates for the selection process. Generally, for any BECE candidate to qualify for placement, the candidate will have to satisfy the total raw score of not less than 200.
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