Students’ or pupils’ registration is one of the
rigorous activities that take place at the National Examinations Council of Tanzania. The system or process takes a long time because any mistake made during this stage will have a long-term effect on the
student or pupil, either during his or her examination, when printing the Notification of Examination Results, or even the Academic Certificates.
One of the common mistakes that headmasters or principals make during registration is submitting incomplete registration data. According to the Head
of Registration of School Candidates (RSC) Unit, Mr. Keita Mwenda, many schools have a tendency of submitting incomplete registration data. “Schools come with their registration data claiming that they have registered all the required subjects, but
when we start going through the data, we realize that some of the most basic subjects are missing or were not registered,” said Mwenda.
Citing different examples, Mr. Mwenda said, there is a tendency of forgetting to register Basic Mathematics subject simply because head teachers tend to confuse its code number 41 with the Bible Knowledge code
number 14.In situations where teachers fail to realize that they did not register students for certain subjects, the students might end up not doing the examination since NECTA starts preparation for printing the examinations after the students’ registration process has ended.
Another glaring mistake which often happens is head teachers failing to relate students’ registration numbers with photo entry numbers. You might find a situation
whereby a student’s registration number is different from the registration number written on their photo entry. This is because someone did not crosscheck their facts or data properly.
This problem might result in students receiving their Notification of Examination Results with different numbers or worse still, their photos can be mixed simply because teachers did not take enough trouble to countercheck their information before sending it to NECTA.
The RSC also hinted on the problem of schools not registering students in time. “You find you are in the middle of July and a letter comes informing you that a certain student was not registered because he/she was sick, or any other lame excuse,” said Mwenda
However, after this problem had occurred repeatedly, a thorough investigation was done and it was realized that some schools do not register students intentionally because they may not have completed paying their school fees, something which consequently hinders NECTA’s operations.
There are so many common mistakes that teachers commit, sometimes without their knowledge or by being misinformed. However, NECTA insists that a lot of caution should be undertaken during students’
registration for examinations. Such mistakes may cause the Council not sending student’s examination to the school, thus causing the student missing out on the examination or worse still, getting a wrongly printed
Notification of Examination Result or Certificate, which can consequently affect him or her at their work place.
