It is no doubt that all external examinations, conducted by the West African Examinations Council in the last ten years, have been characterized with massive malpractice.
The country’s examination body, WAEC, has been accused of condoning the practice to a point that examination question papers leak way before examinations. Candidates are reportedly spending huge sums of money to examination invigilators to have access to foreign materials.
Police personnel, deployed to examination centres, are also reportedly making money through connivance with school authorities and examination officials from the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
A WAEC official, in charge of the storage of examination papers, is currently on the run due to a raid conducted by the ACC when a very good number of pupils were found taking an examination paper that has already been taken the previous day.
The ACC also discovered, during the raid, sex stimulants alongside examination questions and answer papers. It was clear that certain officials at WAEC are condoning the practice. We are now at a point wherein our children are heavily reliant on this cheating method to pass their external exams and this has continued on to our colleges. It is therefore no doubt that these anomalies have devastating impacts on our educational system.
The current efforts by this administration to resurrect the failing educational system should not turn a blind eye on the massive examination malpractice confronting our educational system. Some school heads, the police and officials from WAEC have all been involved in one way or the other to promote this nefarious practice.
We welcome the current actions by the new administration to curb all examinations areas of people or parents who have no business in such centres, exemption of teachers without pin codes from invigilating the exams and also most recently the appointment of examination monitors to police the examinations.
This is not enough and our security agencies and the ACC should employ more covert means to unearth the malpractices in our external examinations. There are schools within and outside Freetown that are flooded by candidates who take the examinations. Our information is that those schools are notorious for exhibiting such tendencies with the connivance of all the stakeholders involved in the conduct of the examinations, including some parents.
As a nation we should not settle for these of products. Government should be very robust to eliminate such vices in our educational system.
Nightwatch has learnt that officials of the West African Examinations Councils have noted that such malpractices are taking place in Sierra Leone largely because Government is not able to fully pay for the conduct of the examinations.
The parent body, in West Africa many say, have once approached the Government of Sierra Leone calling on them to be offsetting all payments due WAEC for the examinations rather than the current arrangement wherein only 50% is paid to WAEC to handle all pre arrangements prior to the conduct of public examinations.
Government should be able to address the issue of full payment if ever this is the justification for the anomaly. They should be able to make the funds available on time to avoid a situation wherein WAEC would have to request for funds for pre examination arrangements.
Government should be aware that there is always going to be an upsurge of candidates to public examinations and hence they should be able to make huge funds available without any wrangling between them and WAEC.
Lastly, it is our expectation that the newly appointed exam monitors will confront the huge task ahead of them by making this year’s examinations malpractice free.