Why NECO postpones Nov/Dec exams start – Official

The National Examination Council (NECO) has explained the reason it postponed its November/December 2018 Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) to Monday, November 19 from November 15.

The Council said the exam the start date of the exams was shifted because of the Federal Government’s decision to declare a public holiday.

The exam body also dismissed the claim that the exam has been postponed three times.

A spokesperson for the body, Mustapha Mahmud, told Punch that: “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.”.