The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), says that 69,231 prospective teachers will write the 2019 Professional Qualifying Examination (PQE), scheduled to hold Oct. 11 and 12, across the country.
Prof. Josiah Ajiboye, TRCN Registrar, announced this in a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday.
Ajiboye said that the PQE assessment introduced by TRCN in 2017 qualifies the prospective teachers to practice.
“The PQE is one of the benchmark processes for registering professionals teachers in the country; one of its major goals is to ensure that teachers are computer-literate.
“Teachers from the 36 states, including FCT, will converge on 45 different Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres to sit for the examination. This briefing is to confirm to members of the public that we are set for the exercise,” he said.
Ajiboye said that Oyo State had the highest entrants with 5145 persons, followed by Lagos with 5117, Kaduna, 4616, FCT, 4414 and Plateau, 3079.
“For FCT, the private schools have the highest number of candidates,” he added.
According to him, Zamfara, with 397, has the lowest number of candidates for the test that would be written in 47 centres with Kaduna State hosting three centres, the highest in the country.
He explained that the council had ordered state coordinators to place announcements on radio so that candidates won’t have difficulty in locating their centres.
“We have also instructed the coordinators to send personal text messages to the candidates so as to minimise the challenges we have often faced in the past years,” he said.
He assured Nigeria that the computer-based test would be transparent, and urged other prospective teachers to register and write the test so as to be certified to teach.
Ajiboye further explained that the examination would be personalised to individual candidates with photographs to ward off cheats. (NAN