GCE results will be released first week of August –GCE Board Registrar

The 2014 session of the Cameroon General Certificate of Education GCE results will be released before the end of the first week of August, 2014.

This revelation was made by the Cameroon GCE Board Registrar Humphrey Monono just before the start of the marking process which began on Monday.

Considering the fact that marking is projected to be over on the 12th of July 2014, this will give reasonable time for the processing and compiling of results to be through by the date slated for the publication of the results.

Commenting on the conduct of the 2014 Session the Registrar said the written phase was successful and serene.

Quizzed on the bilingual version of the GCE, he said it wasn’t exactly the bilingual version of the GCE as some people have been putting it. He said it was the introduction of a bilingual written paper which was optional and reserved for those who had prepared for it.

The Bilingual paper he said touches on a number of subjects written in French and the orals.

For French speaking students, it included Citizenship, Sports and Physical Education and the English Language while for Anglophones it involved Sports and Physical Education, Citizenship and the French Language.

This alteration is not the same as a bilingual version of the GCE but simply gives room for an application of the French and the English Language within the context of the mentioned subjects.

This innovation he said is a reinforcement of our reunification march. His only worry he said was what becomes of these children after the BEPC. From every indication, he said, they will continue normally like any other student.

He however conceded that it sharpens the use of the two languages and called for support to be given to such students in the forms of books and financial motivation.

On the restructuring of examinations, he said the whole thing was still the same Anglo-Saxon as it has always been. There is always the Test Item Construction and then the real test. Items he said are pretested and then validated. Humphrey Monono said there has been a review of Subject Syllabuses both at the General and the Technical GCE.

The first testing of Advanced Level English Language takes place in 2015 while Advanced level Logic and Citizenship will be first tested in 2016.

The man who crowns the edifice of the GCE Board said the improved format; Multiple Choice Questions MCQs was introduced in 2009.

He explained however that this was not the first time that MCQs constituted an important part of these exams. At first he explained MCQs were present in some subjects but were later scrapped and maintained only in Physics.

MCQs he said improved syllabus coverage and reduced the habit of speculation among students and tutors.

Not losing sight of the possibility of bottlenecks to set in, Humphrey Monono explained that the Divisional Delegates of Secondary Education have been of great help in the running of things.

With the rapidly increasing number of candidates he said there would certainly be the need for the creation of liaison offices in the Centre and the North to help the Divisional Delegates. “When the means are there” he added “this will be done but for now it is still a thought.”

Still on bottlenecks, he said the introduction of complementary ways to disseminate results such as using the Mobile Telephone Network MTN greatly made it possible for results to reach a wider range of people and faster.

Newspapers he said published only the names of successful candidates. MTN on the other hand facilitates access to results by everyone who sat for the exams.

“We hope to have it on our website on ROM- Read Only Memory version. Results can always be collected from us and published.”

Aware of the rapidly changing landscape irrespective of the domain, the GCE Board Registrar explained that a lot had been invested in Human Resources through internal and external seminars to update the vision of the Cameroon GCE Board.

The structural Policy of the House he said took into consideration the enormous challenges that lay ahead. “The House is conscious of what the public expects and is trying to catch up with the challenges brought in by the exams. At the Board, we don’t have closing time.

Many others depend on our deadlines. Parents have been happy since 2008 by early release of results as it makes it easier for them to look for schools for their children on time. We want to stand up squarely to the challenges.”

Talking about the new edifice that now serves as the Head Office of the Cameroon GCE Board, Humphrey Monono thanked the Government for the infrastructural uplift saying that without the funds provided by the government nothing of such a magnitude would have been achieved.

The working environment he said was a lot more conducive with more working space. The former office was really challenging with noise filtering in from near bye bars and eating houses that constantly distracted workers from offices.

He hoped that other structures that should normally accompany such a structure that now houses the GCE board should also be put in place so as to make the place complete. “We should like to leave the Cameroon GCE Board better than we left it”