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The Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) has advised candidates who wrote this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) to text their index numbers and the last two digits of year of examination to the short code 1060 to confirm the schools they have selected.

It said candidates could text to the short code on any mobile network except Glo for the confirmation to ensure that no candidate was placed in a senior high school or technical institute he/she did not choose.

The outgoing National Co-ordinator of the CSSPS, Mr George Atta Boateng, who said this in an interview with the Junior Graphic, noted that the exercise which had just begun would be over at the end of September.

The exercise, he said, would not allow any candidate to change a school he or she chose before the BECE began.

He explained that the confirmation by each candidate was to ensure a smooth placement exercise this year.

“Every year we improve upon the placement exercise and we want to ensure that the exercise is smooth”, he explained.

Meanwhile, the CSSPS secretariat has adopted new measures this year to improve on the placement exercise in senior high schools (SHSs) and technical institutes (TIs).

One of them is that the secretariat would now indicate the actual marks of candidates in the various subjects with their corresponding total raw scores and emboss their photographs on the placement forms.

In addition, there would be QR Codes (a machine-readable optical label containing information) bearing other details of candidates on the forms.

The initiative aims at addressing the situation where fake CSSPS placement forms were issued to prospective candidates. A total of 438,030 candidates from 13,434 public and private junior high schools wrote this year’s BECE.

The candidates represent an increase of 15,084 over last year’s figure of 422,946.