The West African Examination Council has alleged that supervisors who are supposed to take questions to examination centres are aiding and abetting malpractices across the country. The Head of National Office, Nigeria, Mr Patrick Areghan, made this known in Abuja while monitoring the examination in some government secondary schools. During the monitoring process, he identified 56 rogue website operators that leaked its West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations papers.
Areghan said that the identified rogue website operators would be prosecuted by the police in due course. “Some gullible parents and students will go for it and destroy themselves because there is no way they can get our questions. In all, we have made arrests of no fewer than 15 persons comprising of candidates, supervisors, school proprietors and others connected with malpractices. Supervisors are our problems. They make a lot of money from this. The exam is taking place in over 21,000 secondary schools in Nigeria with only 2,000 staff strength. How many centres are we going to man? These supervisors are teachers given to us by state ministries of education and when they come, they make it a business”, he said.
But their days are coming to an end. Following the observation of exam malpractices, no fewer than 10 supervisors of the West African Examination Council (WAEC) Examination were recently arrested by the Nigerian police over alleged involvement in examination malpractices in the ongoing Senior Secondary Certificate Examination in the country. This was disclosed by the Examination Body’s Head of Nigeria National Office, Patrick Areghan on Thursday, 8 June 2023. According to Areghan, the supervisors were arrested in Lagos, Kano, Bayelsa and Kaduna states.
“Our major problem lies with the supervisors as only few of them are reliable. It is unfortunate these are the supervisors that were nominated by the various states’ ministry of education and we employed them. We don’t have the power to nominate any supervisors on our own. We only make use of credible teachers supplied to us by the ministry. But for a mere pot of porridge, they sell their consciences and allow candidates to come into the examination hall with phones to snap question papers and post them on designated platforms,” Nigerian newspapers quoted him as saying.
According to him, some of the supervisors belonged to syndicate groups but he noted that the good news is that “we catch them and they don’t go unpunished as we are working hand in hand with the Nigerian police.” While condemning the act by schools that swindle money out of some prospective candidates and don’t enroll them for the exams, he said it was not the fault of WAEC that they were not enrolled.
Areghan advised candidates to desist from examination malpractice, saying those who smuggle textbooks into examination halls or indulge in impersonation would not get their results. “The most troubling one is the activities of roadside website operators whereby they post their so-called expo on digital platforms and use it to deceive gullible candidates and parents who pay for their wards to access these platforms. They are fake, and even if they are not, when will they have time to access those materials as examination is already going on?”
The Permanent Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education, David Adejo, expressed satisfaction with the process and the deployment of technology in the authentication of candidates saying that had reduced malpractice. He said: “Malpractices can occur in the examination centres with the collision of the school authority and biometric machines have reduced malpractice to infinitesimal. I will be surprised if I hear of any malpractice.”
