Another moment of effervescence was observed Wednesday July 24, 2024 when the Cameroon GCE Board dropped results of the 2024 GCE Ordinary and Advanced levels.

Candidates, parents, relative, Friends and School authorities took straight to the social media where the complete results were published.

The results have been making rounds on different social media platforms especially WhatsApp where users download to check their results.

Today the results move at the speed of light thanks to the internet and online platforms. Some eight years ago and beyond, the exclusivity of the GCE results was in the hands of newspapers and CRTV Radio.

The newspapers had an edge over the radio because they could publish all the results both Ordinary and Advanced levels in one or Two editions. Whereas the radio took over a week to read the results of the different centres.

It kept candidates patiently waiting.
The Publisher of Cameroon English Language Newspapers The Herald Tribune, Richard Nde Lajong says gone are the days they used to make business out of GCE results. Copies of the newspaper carrying the results used to sell like hotcakes. Publishers even increased the number of copies run at the press.

To obtain the results then was also tricky ” We had to apply to the GCE Board to get results. When results were released they were handed to us in a USB Key and we took for printing and publishing.

Newspapers like The Herald, The Post, Cameroon Post, The Guardian Post, The Herald Tribune were all in stiff competition on who published the GCE results first.

The CRTV Radio on the National Station, CRTV Buea and CRTV Bamenda took turns to read results of the thousands of exam centres. It used to take several days or weeks to read all of the results.

They usually started with the Advanced Level, then followed the Ordinary Level.

This kept candidates in suspense and tension
It used to go thus ‘ Centre number 0000, center name, number of candidates registered 70, sat 65 . Number of successful candidates 59 and the the percentage scored. Passed in 11 subjects”.

This process remains engraved in the minds of those who wrote the GCE before it was published online.

They have different memories. Catherine who wrote the ‘A’ levels GCE in 2003 says to calm down her anxiety while waiting for Radio to read the results of her centre, she had to follow her mother to the farm. ” It was a long wait” she says ” the whole neighborhood was waiting to hear my results.

‘I was very nervous’ she added.
But during the past seven years the results have been published online. The subject passed and grades are no more mentioned.

But less than 24 hours after the release of the results, the candidate’s slips are already available in their centres. This has helped to breakdown the tension that used to be.

Prisilia Lum