Africa-Press – South-Sudan. The sudden fall in the number of students sitting for this year’s South Sudan Certificate of Secondary Examination (SSCSE) is a cause for alarm.
Only 32,167 candidates are sitting for the exams nationwide, compared to the 33,255 who sat last year.
The number of candidates has been increasing in the last eight years. For instance, from 2013 to 2020, there was an increment of 6,565 registered students in the 2020 examinations. This is according to the data from the national ministry of education.
On Wednesday, Simon Nyok, the Secretary-General of the National Examination Council, said there are only 32, 167 candidates currently sitting for the SSCSE exams.
He said of the 32,167 candidates, 21,799 are males and 10,368 are females, and that 340 secondary schools have been clustered into 107 examination sitting centres.
“We only had 38 storage stations nationwide and he had deployed monitors from the national ministry of education and the national examination secretariat together with a team from national security nationwide. They were to monitor and control the exams in every station, even the centres,” Nyok told the media during the launch of the exams in Juba.
While announcing the SSCSE results for 2020, the Minister of General Education and Instruction, Awut Deng Acuil, said she expected the number of candidates to increase to 45,000 in the academic year 2021.
She linked this to the increasing number of candidates sitting for senior four exams over the last eight years.
Unfortunately, reading from the total number of students sitting for this year’s exams, the ministry significantly failed to meet the target of the 45,000 candidates expected. There is already been a drastic decrease in the number of candidates, from 33,255 last academic year to 32,167.
The ministry has registered a decrease of 2,088 people, which should be of great concern to the government. There could be various causes, but the figure has dropped much lower compared to the year when the country was battling many challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
The minister of education and its educational partners need to find out the basis of the decrease to meet its target in the future. This low number of candidates could also affect the gains in the last eight years.
According to the data from the ministry, the transition rate of the students has been increasing over the last eight years to 97.4 per cent in 2020 compared to the year 2019 which was 92.5 percent.
This represents a 4.9 percent improvement over the previous two years. However, this gain percentage is likely to decline too if the number of students sitting for the exams continues to decline. We don’t expect the country to have a decline in the number of candidates at a time when it is supposed to move forward to match with other countries in the region and Africa at large.
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