The West African Examination Council announced that some examination malpractices are the fault of questionable supervisors who leak exam questions to criminals.
According to Nairametrics, the Head of the National Office for Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Areghan, revealed this while observing the test in some Government Secondary Schools on Thursday in Abuja.
“Supervisors are our issue; they profit greatly from this. With barely 2,000 staff members, the exam is being administered in over 21,000 secondary schools across Nigeria.
“These supervisors are teachers given to us by state ministries of education and when they come, they make it a business.
“Due to distance in some schools, we have a rule that papers must be released to supervisors one hour before the start of class to allow them to travel from the collection site to the administration point.
“However, they actually copy the test questions and submit them to their syndicate groups.”
He also stated that it has tracked down 56 malicious website owners who leaked information on its West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations.
According to Areghan, the authorities would eventually bring charges against the owners of the identified rogue websites.
“You are uploading the questions while candidates are already present in the exam room. Sometimes they add 2023 to exam questions from 2020 by changing the front of the questions.
“There are some naive parents and students who will go for it and hurt themselves since they can’t possibly get our questions.”
According to the WAEC head, the council has placed technologies in place to identify any kind of mischief coming from anywhere. He claimed that as a result, during the continuing investigation, the Council had made several arrests in various states.
“I’m pleased to report that we’ve made a lot of arrests so far, in addition to several other states, we made arrests in Ibadan, Maiduguri, Abeokuta, Osogbo, and Umuahia. We have detained no fewer than 15 people in total, including candidates, managers, school owners, and others involved in the malpractices.
He added that small boys post questions for advertisements on social media, solicit applicants to subscribe to their websites, and then provide them with fake questions.
To establish a good and solid educational system, he, therefore, made a plea to the candidates, teachers, and parents, stressing that everyone must be on deck to battle the monsters known as examination malpractices.
The exams are now being taken by 1,621,895 candidates in more than 21,000 secondary schools nationwide.
