SHS placement ready in October
The placement of candidates into senior high schools and technical institutes will be done by the first week in October, the Coordinator of the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS), Mr George Atta-Boateng, has said.
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According to him, once the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results are released by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) at the end of August, the council will use about two weeks to deal with examination malpractices that occurred during the period, after which the results will be forwarded to the CSSPS Secretariat for the placement to be done.
“We expect that WAEC will release the results by the first week in September. That is what we are expecting, and then it will take WAEC some two more weeks to address issues such as malpractices before the results get to us in the last week of September and we will take a minimum of 14 days to release the placement list.
“Let’s say between the end of September and the first week in October, we should complete the exercise,” he said.
Currently, Mr Atta-Boateng said the CSSPS was correcting errors that were made by candidates during the selection of schools, adding that the corrections were to ensure, among other things, that boys were not posted to girls’ schools and vice versa.
As part of the exercise, he said the bio-data of the candidates and the courses they had selected were being critically screened to make the exercise successful.
He gave an assurance that this year’s exercise would be smooth, adding that “last year’s was better” and the expectation was that this year would see a vast improvement.
Mr Atta-Boateng said since the exercise began in 2005 there had not been any unnecessary interference in the placement exercise and candidates were placed on merit based on their performance in the BECE.
“Last year, we successfully placed 99.5 per cent of the 392,000 candidates.”
With regard to the confirmation of the schools the candidates had selected, he said the exercise was very encouraging with over 100,000 candidates confirming their choices as of Friday, August 1, 2014.
Asked whether or not there had been any complaint from the candidates, Mr Atta-Boateng said it was only one candidate who wanted to change the schools he had selected but we communicated to the person that it was not possible to do that.
“Last year, we gave the candidates one month to confirm their selected schools but this year, we are giving them between two and three months to do that, so it is an improvement over the previous years”.
A total of 422,946 candidates wrote this year’s BECE.