Inter-Agency Differential Analysis of Student Mathematics Grading in Senior Secondary Certificate Examination

The study analysed student Mathematics grading in the senior secondary certificate examinations conducted by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO) in Andoni Local Government Area (ANOLGA) of Rivers State, Nigeria. Analytical survey design of the expost-facto research type was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised 19,800 students who sat for WASSCE between 2000 and 2018 and NSSCE between 2000 and 2011 in Mathematics from the eleven senior secondary schools in ANOLGA. Systematic sampling technique was used to select the grades of 3640 students who sat for WASSCE and NSSCE Mathematics between 2000 and 2018 from the five mixed public schools randomly selected for the study through their master list. Three research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. The Student Mathematics Grade Sheet (SMGS) was the instrument used for data collection. The validity of SMGS was established by experts in Mathematics Education. Using test-retest method and the Spearman’s Rank-Order Correlation (SROC), a reliability coefficient of 0.70 was obtained. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the three research questions while t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 levels of significance. Findings of the study revealed that students’ Mathematics grades in WASSCE and NSSCE were high and not significantly different. Also, there was no significant difference between the male and the female students Mathematics grades in both examinations. The study concluded that WAEC and NECO are of similar standard and do not contribute to the abysmal performance of students being reported in Mathematics. The study therefore recommended among others that students, teachers and parents should not prefer WAEC to NECO or verse versa during registration because student Mathematics grades in both examinations were not different