The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) says it has withheld 28,768 results of candidates who sat for the 2015 November/December West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) over examination malpractice.
The Head of National Office of WAEC, Mr Olutise Adenipekun, made the disclosure at a news conference in Lagos on Thursday where he announced the release of the results for private candidates.
According to him, the figure represents 12.13 per cent of 237,154 candidates that sat for the examination.
Adenipekun said that the results were being withheld for further investigations.
He said that reports of the investigations would be presented to the Nigeria Examinations Committee (NEC) of the council for consideration.
Adenipekun, who recently assumed office following the retirement of his predecessor, said that the committee’s decisions would be communicated to the affected candidates in due course.
He said that 235,542 candidates, representing 99.23 per cent, had their results fully processed and released.
“However, 1,612 others, representing 0.68 per cent, have few of their subjects still being processed due to some errors traceable mainly to the candidates in the course of registration or writing the examination.
“Such errors are being corrected by the council to enable the affected candidates to have their results,’’ he said.
Adenipekun said that 79,490, representing 33.51 per cent of the total number of candidates that sat for the examination, obtained six credits and above, while 113,573 had five credits.
According to him, 146,253 candidates obtained credits and above in four subjects, while 175,718 others got credits and above in three subjects.
He said that a total of 200,304 candidates obtained credits and above in two subjects.
Adenipekun advised candidates who sat for the examination to check the details of their results on the council’s results website, www.waecdirect.org, within 24 hours.
He said that the council had deployed another cutting edge technology to continue to protect the integrity of its examinations and ”remain many steps ahead of perpetrators of examination malpractice”.
Adenipekun said that the deployment of a technology known as “CredenceOne’’ was introduced during the 2015 WASSCE November/December diet of the council’s examination.
”The technology is an intersection mobile communications biometric device.
“It is a mobile biometric identification and verification system built on the Android Operating System.
“Using CredenceOne is as simple as using your mobile phone. It is used to initiate and complete the biometric verification of candidates’ fingerprints.
“The device is programmed to compare the scanned fingerprint templates captured during registration and display the candidates’ details to check impersonation,’’ he said.
Adenipekun said that the system also took the candidates’ attendance and automatically sent the records online to the remote central server for reporting.
“With this innovation, we can boldly say that WAEC, Nigeria now has its biometric fingerprint identification and verification system on a mobile device,’’ he said.