By Sunday Okobi
The Registrar, West African Examination Council (WAEC), Dr, Iyi Uwadiae, has raised the alarm that some private candidates writing its examinations have devised notorious acts of drugging supervisors while some even bring guns to examinations halls.
Uwadiae made the revelation at a briefing in Lagos to announce the convocation of an international summit on examination malpractice between October 19 and 20, 2017.
According to Uwadiae, while the examination body will not be requesting permission from government to arm its personnel, it has nonetheless become expedient to cry out to let the populace understand the danger the examination body and its supervisors are facing from candidates who are hell bent in perpetrating examination malpractices.
WAEC also lamented
the high rate of malpractices in its public examination, saying misguided
candidates and their collaborators, including school authorities, teachers and
parents, have continued to devise ingenious and sophisticated methods of
cheating.
The Council’s Registrar, who also briefed journalists
in Lagos on its plans to hold a summit on examination malpractice with theme:
‘Examination Malpractice: The Contemporary Realities and Antidotes’, said the reported cases of fraud for those whose
results were withheld grew from 58, 494 in the May/June1993 WASSCE in Nigeria
to 214,952 in 2017.
According to him, “Examination malpractice is a form of
corruption; there are people who patronise the people who perpetrate this evil
and that is why they have continued to be in the market. The council, in the
five member countries, has introduced several measures, adopted various
strategies and deployed technologies at great costs in the fight against the
ever festering menace.”
Research studies, he noted, had shown that one of the ways of
curbing the worrisome trends in examination irregularities is by mounting
public enlightenment campaigns to draw attention of the stakeholders in
education and the public to the negative effects of examination malpractice on
national development.
He stressed the need for more enlightenment campaigns
especially in churches and mosques to constantly remind children and adults of
the negative effect of going into such act.
“People wants to reap where they did not sow. For us, the
cost of conducting an examination has become so high; money that would have
been used to take care of staff is going into conducting an examination. Our
fight against the menace is yielding fruits but the more we fight, the more
people perpetrate the criminal act,” the registrar said
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