Private candidates cause BEC outsourcing headache

Baboki Kayawe | Tuesday October 25, 2016 15:28

The problem is caused by the fact that BEC does not have a regional presence, hence no infrastructure to accommodate private candidates, the council has explained.

BEC’s communications manager, Fingile Makgalemele said this when asked about the state of examinations.  The Standard 7 exams have ended while Junior Certificate Exams (JCE) and the Botswana General Certificate of Secondary Exams (BGCSE) are ongoing, ending on November 4 and 11 respectively.

“This is a major challenge since the numbers keep going up as our children endeavour to improve their results,” Makgalemele said.

Last year, the private candidates category included 6,569 (16.9%) Back-to-School candidates, 3,591 (9.3 percent) individual private candidates and 2,996 (7.7 percent) candidates from private schools for BGCSE.

Besides issues of administration of exams for private candidates, she explained there were no unique challenges compared to the previous years.

Otherwise, all is well as the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) has been completed and preparations are underway for marking.

BEC could not, however, state the number of candidates writing the exams.

“This information we do not yet have since we have only started receiving PSLE materials from the centres and these are being sorted and prepared for the scanning into electronic version.  This process helps with exact numbers of those who actually sat (for) examinations versus the registered candidate numbers.  JCE and BGCSE will be captured upon completion,” she said.  She added that BEC is only privy to registration data, which “we wouldn’t want to divulge at this stage as it might bring confusion when the actual numbers for those who sat are shared”.

Meanwhile, the localisation of the BGCSE; (offered in partnership with Cambridge) is said to be on course with so far most of the processes having been localised. 

“These include the setting of question papers, the typesetting of the papers, the conduct of the examination, the processing of the examinations, grading of the candidates as well as the certifying of the candidates,” Makgalemele said.

Moreover, BEC has an accreditation agreement with Cambridge International Examinations, which ensures that all the aspects of the examinations are up to international standards.