Supervisors behind malpractice, they make billions from it – WAEC

The West African Examination Council says unscrupulous supervisors are behind malpractices that plague the conduct of examination by the body.

The examination body condemned the action of the corrupt supervisors, accusing them of making “a lot of money” from exam malpractices.

Patrick Areghan, WAEC’s head of the national office in Nigeria, made this known on Thursday in Abuja while monitoring the examination in some government secondary schools.

“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?” stated Mr Areghan.

He added, “These supervisors are teachers given to us by state ministries of education, and when they come, they make it a business. We are not in control of social media, small boys post questions for advertisement and ask candidates to subscribe on their websites, and then they give them fake questions.”

The WAEC official appealed to candidates, teachers and parents to maintain the ethics of examination to have a good and sound educational system saying that all hands must be on deck to fight the monsters called examination malpractices.

Also, the WAEC board chair, Binta Abdulkadri, expressed concerns about the involvement of school principals in exam malpractice.

Abdulkadri, the director of senior secondary education at the federal ministry of education, commended WAEC for deploying technology to nab perpetrators of examination malpractice.

Meanwhile, WAEC said it had identified 56 rogue website operators that leaked its West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations (WASSCE).

The WAEC official explained that the exam body had implemented technology to detect malpractices from any location.

“I am happy to announce that so far in this exam, we have made a lot of arrests. We made arrests in Ibadan, Maiduguri, Abeokuta, Osogbo, Umuahia and many other states,” he disclosed. “In all, we have made arrests of no fewer than 15 persons comprising candidates, supervisors, school proprietors, and others connected with the malpractices.”

One million six hundred twenty-one thousand eight hundred ninety-five candidates are sitting the examinations across the country in over 21,000 secondary schools.

(NAN)