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NECO: Postponement of examination caused by public holiday

Published

6 years ago

November 16, 2018

The National Examination Council has said that the recent postponement of its examination for private candidates was due to the Federal Government ’ s decision to declare a public holiday .
The body also dismissed the insinuation that this was the third time it postponed the examination , describing it as a social media hoax and explaining that it had not released its timetable up until its publications appeared in the print and broadcast media on Wednesday .

NECO ’ s Director of Exam Administration , Mustapha Abdul , made this known in an interview with our correspondent on Thursday .

Stating that copies of the updated examination timetable had been emailed to candidates so that they would not suffer the fate of missing a paper , Abdul said , “ We planned our timetable based on the fact that we expected Wednesday to be a holiday , that is the Eid -el- Maolud . However , the change was confirmed yesterday ( Wednesday ) , when we learn from an authoritative source that the Federal Government would declare Tuesday a public holiday , instead of Wednesday .

“ Since we cannot have an examination on a public holiday , the best thing we could do was to shift it and notify the candidates . The examination would have started today . And if we had shifted the exams around without notifying the candidates , so many candidates would have missed their vital papers .

“ So we needed to buy time for people to be notified of the change and not miss their papers . If there was no public holiday , there wouldn ’ t have been a shift .

“ We took this step because this is a private examination for people who really need to pass a subject that is required to gain admission to the university . If there is any mix- up and they miss a paper, it could be very devastating . That ’ s why we had to shift the examination to give people ample time to get better information . ”

Reacting to the postponement , a candidate , Olu Jaiyesimi , who was supposed to sit the examination at Tolu School Complex in the Ajeromi Ifelodun Local Government Area of Lagos State , said that he expected the NECO examination to be shifted . “ I didn ’ t bother myself because I was expecting them to shift the examination . This is the third time now . It is almost as if they are not interested in conducting the examination . ”

This was just as Amara Okoye , another candidate that was to take the examination in Ibafo , Ogun State, said she heard of the last two postponements on twitter and was not surprised when the third one came .

Calling on candidates to always check NECO ’ s official website and their personal email to get information , as opposed to relying on the social media , Abdul said , “ This is the first time it has been postponed . We scheduled it to hold from November 19 to December 19 . We had never released any timetable before then . The information that was passed around before now is incorrect . That happens a lot on social media . That is why we refer people to our website to download the updated timetable . We sent emails and text messages to candidates , just to make sure that they got correct information and no one missed a paper. ”