2012 GCE - Electronic Registration as Major Innovation

Despite little problems, all is set to ensure a hitch-free GCE examination.

All that is necessary to ensure that the over 142,000 candidates sitting in for the 2012 Cameroon General Certificate of Education Ordinary and Advanced levels carry out the exercise hitch-free have already been put in place by the administration of the Board. With a new electronic system used in registering candidates, the registrar of the Cameroon General Certificate of Education Board, Humphrey Monono, says the innovative electronic way of registering candidates during this year's GCE examination helped in reducing errors linked to the registration of candidates although some surprising loopholes were noticed.

Through the electronic registration system (E-registration), various examination centres forwarded to the Board Compact Discs (CDs) or Flash pens from which the latter downloaded the list of registered candidates. Humphrey Monono however noted that at the level of examination centres, they issued receipts of registration fees paid and the timetables for the individual candidates. In spite of the E-registration system which was aimed to facilitate GCE registration, few hitches were still witnessed. According to the Registrar of the GCE Board some of the CDs could not be read, due to incompatibility with some machines. Another problem has to deal with the spellings of names and dates of birth. Humphrey Monono lamented "I do not know why at this point where the responsibility of candidates registration is given to the centres, these errors still occur. When we were filling forms and scanning them, there were very many complaints. Now the complaints are still there".

Furthermore, the fact that some schools mistakenly did not register some of their candidates also created problems in the registration procedure. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Humphrey Monono noted that they are not enough to stop the examination from taking place for the board is dabbling with such problems before examination kicks-off. Besides E-registration the Board has the ambition to move on to online registration and online communication between candidates and the Board. Meanwhile within the Board itself many other organisational innovations are taking place.