President of the Accra Institute of Technology (AIT), Prof. Clement K. Dzidonu has said the use of technology can prevent the leakages and subsequent cancellation of examination papers.
Speaking at the 8th graduation ceremony of the school in Accra, he stated that in as much as technology played a role in spreading the leaked papers to wider audience, it could also be used to prevent leakage.
“The fact that technology is being used to aggravate the problem by amplifying the intensity of the magnitude of the spread, reach and speed of the leakage means that this is a new ball game, a whole brand-new problem that cannot be addressed using old tools, ways or means,” he said.
His call followed the leakage of some of the papers of the 2015 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) resulting in the nationwide cancellation of five papers.
The school he said was proposing one such innovative technological system termed the Storage-to-Terminal (STT) system to address the issue. The proposed STT system for mitigating and eliminating leakage according to Prof. Dzidonu would involve four steps.
“To begin with is the storage of the electronic version of the examination question in a Question Bank in an encrypted format on a secure server with layers of computer security access control and authentication features and restrictions at a secret centralised secured strong-room location,” he said.
The second step he said, “on the day of particular examination, just minutes before the actual examination, a computer program will automatically generate the examination paper by randomly selecting questions from the Question Bank to either set a single paper with each having different sets of randomised questions.”
“The transmission of the encrypted papers over a secure link dumb terminals or tablets at the examination centers throughout the country which will then display the papers on the dumb terminal screens”, he advised.
“Finally, each candidate in each of the examination halls will read the examination question on his or her dumb terminal screen and then answer the questions in the usual way using the standard examination answer script or booklet which will then be handed over to the invigilator at the end of the examination,” he added.
