The credibility and quality of the results of public examinations in a given country depends to a large extent on the quality of the processes which are put in place before such examinations.
In Nigeria, the National Examinations Council (NECO) is one of the public examination bodies saddled with the responsibility of conducting examinations for award of junior and senior secondary school certificates. One of the activities involved in the processes is that of monitoring and accreditation of Secondary Schools. The essence of monitoring and accreditation of schools for the council’s examination is that of ascertaining the level of facilities, personnel and quality of teaching-learning activities taking place in the participating schools.
This paper tries to present a model as used by the Council for carrying out monitoring and accreditation exercise. The approach is that of using the I.P.O model (i.e. Inputs, Processes and Outputs). Efforts were made to identify critical elements of inputs (laboratories, classrooms, students’ population, teacher population, examination hall etc), processes (level of teacher-student interactions, lesson notes, time table, class attendance books, and level of management of resources etc) and outputs (continuous assessment records, class work ,anecdotes, test scores, projects and assignment records etc).
It is recommended that other examination bodies and allied organizations borrow a leaf from the model being proposed by the paper.