Mr Patrick Areghan
Invigilators selling WAEC questions online arrested. In this interview, GRACE EDEMA speaks with Mr. Patrick Areghan, Head of the West African Examinations Council’s Nigerian Office, on the measures the testing organization has taken to reduce cheating.
The West African Senior School Certificate Examination questions are reportedly available online an hour before the start of the exam for N2,000. How accurate is that?
A dog is not just called a terrible name because the owner wants to hang the animal. This organization, known for professionalism, ethics, and responsibility, has been around for 71 fruitful years and is still going strong. We don’t avoid our obligations. Nothing compares to leakage in WAEC. It’s never occurred before. 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.
We do have a mechanism in place to keep track of their whereabouts, though. The Candidates Identity Verification, Attendance, Malpractice, and Post Examinations Management System is what we name it. We anticipate that it will take them 30 minutes to travel once they have collected the exam papers at 8 am, but what do they do? They will demobilize the system in each of the schools. They will inform you that it is ineffective. This is untrue as we use that method to record attendance. We utilize that to document exam fraud and to collect candidate information, but they will deactivate it.
Only slightly more than 1,000 people work with WAEC. Additionally, the last exam included data from 21,222 secondary schools. How can 21,222 secondary schools be monitored with, say, 1,500 staff members? Nothing under the sun makes that possible. We now rely on our supervisors, who are temporary employees. And these are individuals who the education ministries of the various states have sent to us.
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 set up training for them, which we refer to as briefing, and after that, we give them letters of appointment and mail them to institutions other than their own. What transpires? Nigerians have a “go and make money” mentality. If they don’t get money from the candidates, they won’t enter the exam room. When they arrive, they act busy while bringing out a duplicate of the exam and taking a picture 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.
We have a built-in internal mechanism that we have developed as a system to identify all of those activities, which is fortunate for us. We can trace the posting of the question paper to determine who, when, and where it occurred at the center. Then we dispatch police to the area to apprehend the applicants, administrators, and invigilators. Now that we have them in custody. 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.