Hidden Dangers of MoE’s Free 2024 School Placement Checking Policy

Have you wondered about thr possible hidden dangers of MoE’s Free 2024 School Placement Checking policy? Well, everthing has a negative side especially access to online data without any better way of accessing it than an index number.

While the decision by the government through the Ministry of Education to make the 2024 BECE School Placement Checking free for all candidates is good, the decision comes with several foreseen challenges when the placements are released.

These challenges can create new problems for the MoE, the GES, and the government on one side, as well as parents and candidates on the other side.

Once the portal goes live, there is likely to be a significant increase in traffic to the site. This is because it is free to check, and so everyone will rush to the sites, and many will constantly be on the site checking and rechecking, which will create inconveniences for others.

Further more, the schools into which candidates have been placed can be checked even by strangers once they know the index number sequence of one candidate in a school. Such a person can decide to check the placement of all students at a given school without authorization from parents. Even candidates can check the placement of their colleagues and break the news to others.

School teachers can check all student placements individually.

For those who are not placed, people without authorisation will easily check and even attempt to do self-placement for such students because the index numbers may have become public knowledge. The index numbers are such that, if you know one from a school, you can guess with accuracy the index numbers of all other students.

All this will lead to data breaches and high traffic on the site.If the site is not one that can take the huge traffic, it may end up not being accessible to many and slow as well.

The Ministry of Education must be ready to deal with the challenges outlined above when it releases the school placements for checking.

The use of paid-for placement checkers helped to protect the placement status of candidates in the BECE. It also helped to reduce avoidable traffic to the site by persons who do not have the pavement checker to check it. This in itself naturally dealt with the huge numbers that would have visited in the past if it was free. Now that it is free, if there are no security systems in place, the above challenges will become widely spread.

With the MoE’s Free 2024 School Placement Checking Policy, it is even possible to have more than one person checking the school palcement of the same student at the same time at different locations which will put excess pressure of the portal’s resources.

READ: MoE announces deadline to release school placement results of 2024 BECE graduates

Breaches that could be anticipated with the MoE’s free 2024 School Placement Checking policy:

1. Unauthorized Access: Since only an index number is needed, anyone with knowledge of one candidate’s index number or the general sequence could access placements without authorization. This opens the possibility for strangers, teachers, or other students to view private placement information.
2. Privacy Violations: Students’ placement information could be accessed and potentially shared without their consent. This could lead to unwanted exposure and dissemination of sensitive personal data.
3. Data Manipulation Risks: With free access, unauthorized individuals may try to perform self-placement on behalf of candidates who are not placed, potentially leading to mismatches in school assignments.
4. Traffic Overload and Site Crashes: The open, free nature of the platform is likely to attract excessive traffic as users check and recheck placement statuses, leading to site slowdowns or even crashes, which would inconvenience legitimate users.
5. Index Number Exploitation: Since index numbers can be easily guessed in sequence, there’s a high risk of mass unauthorized checking, which could lead to bulk data scraping or misuse of placement data by third parties.
6. Loss of Confidentiality: The policy compromises the security layer previously provided by the checker card system, meaning placement information becomes broadly accessible, potentially leading to bullying, favoritism, or stigmatization based on school placements.
7. Risk of Data Breaches: High demand on the platform without adequate security could expose vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of hacks or data breaches where student information might be harvested for malicious purposes.

Do not be surprised if the site crushes or you visit the site and it takes forver to load.

The Ministry of Education may need to consider additional security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, rate limiting, or a PIN-based access system, to mitigate these risks.