THE PUNCH
In this interview, the Head of Nigeria Office, West African Examinations Council, Mr Patrick Areghan, tells GRACE EDEMA about the strategies the examination body has put in place to curb malpractices
It is believed that with N2,000, one can get the West African Senior School Certificate Examination questions online an hour before the commencement of such an examination. How true is this?
You don’t just call a dog a bad name because you want to hang it. This is an organisation that has existed for 71 good years and it’s still standing strong, known for professionalism, integrity, and accountability. We don’t shirk our responsibility. In WAEC, there’s nothing like leakage. It has never happened. What happens now is that we have some unscrupulous and unreliable supervisors who are ready to die for a mere pocket profit. When we give them our question papers, one hour before the scheduled time, to enable them to transit between the collection point and the administration point, and we have released these materials to them, it’s out of our hands. However, there is a system we use to monitor their movement. We call it the Candidates Identity Verification, Attendance, Malpractice and Post Examinations Management System. When they collect (the question papers) at 8 am, we estimate about 30 minutes to transit, but what do they do? In the various schools, they will demobilise the system. They will tell you it’s not working. This is not true because that is what we use to take attendance. That’s what we use to record examination malpractice and know the details of the candidates but they will demobilise it.
WAEC has just more than 1,000 staff members. And we have about 21,222 secondary schools in the last exam. How do, let’s say 1,500 staff members, monitor 21,222 secondary schools? That’s not possible under the sun. So, we now rely on our ad hoc workers called supervisors. And these are people sent to us by the various states’ ministries of education.
We don’t have the right or power of our own to employ any teacher to serve as a supervisor or an invigilator. They have the credibility criteria that they follow. It doesn’t just end there. We sit down together; we screen them one by one and pick the supposedly good ones without blemish.
We organise training for them, which we call briefing and then we give them letters of appointment and post them to schools that are different from their own schools. What happens? The Nigerian mentality is to go and make money. They won’t go into the exam hall unless they collect money from candidates. When they get there, they pretend to be busy and bring out a copy of the question paper and take a photograph of it. They belong to different syndicate groups on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. These people advertise boldly that candidates should pay into so-and-so accounts and the students will now subscribe.
Luckily for us, we have got an in-built, in-house mechanism, which is a system we have put together to detect all those activities. We are able to track to identify who posted (the question paper), when it was posted, and where it was posted at the centre. Then we send police officers to go and arrest the candidates, supervisors, and invigilators. We have arrested them now. They are being tried in various states, but we want to report all of them to the Inspector General of Police so they can be centrally monitored.
What’s the implication of examination malpractice and carrying a certificate you didn’t work for around?
Having a certificate you didn’t work for is a sin because you are trying to cut corners. That’s not the way of God. Second, it reduces self-esteem. You don’t even believe in yourself, in your ability to do anything again. Once you cheat, that self-esteem is gone. The third implication is the societal effect, which is, moral decadence. We are losing our societal value of working hard to achieve greatness. You want to achieve greatness through illegal means and it is affecting the moral and social fabric of society. Again, that’s corruption. It breeds cultism in universities; they are the quack doctors, engineers, teachers, and so on. You can see the multiplier effect.
