The West African Examination Council (WAEC) has announced that it will be serialising certain questions in the 2023 West African Senior High School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to combat exam malpractices.

The council believes that this measure will help maintain the integrity of the exam.

Under the serialisation process, candidates in the same exam hall will receive the same question, but with different question numbers.

The subjects selected for serialisation are those considered to be high stake and crucial, as they are less prone to compromise.

John Kapi, Head of Public Affairs at the Council, emphasized that the structure of the questions remains unchanged, and serialisation is part of their trade secret to ensure fairness and security.

He clarified that this move is not meant to unduly punish anyone but rather safeguard the integrity of the exam.

“Serialisation is not anything that is landing from space. Besides nothing has changed about the structure of the questions. It is just that we have serialised some of them. It is our trade secret, and we want to maintain that. We are not unduly punishing anybody, it is the same question just that there is some serialisation. There are some of these papers that are high stake and so for those high stake papers we would want to serialise them.”

“Secondly it is a very expensive venture to get into, it is time-consuming and all of that. And so we concentrate more on the high stake papers and then there are a few of them that we consider as low risk, and so we don’t serialise those ones,” he said.

Due to the cost and time-consuming nature of the process, WAEC will focus on serialising high stake papers while considering some subjects as low risk, and therefore not requiring serialisation.

In total, 447,204 candidates from 975 schools are expected to sit for this year's WASSCE.