WAEC Bans Candidates, Teachers Over Malpractices

Posted by admin Headlines Saturday, April 9th, 2011

Some of the 51, 876 candidates who were involved in various allegations of examination malpractice at the November/December 2010 West African Senior School Certificate Examination have been banned from writing any WAEC-organised examination for three years.

The acting chairman of the Nigeria Examinations Committee (NEC) of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), Chief Adeniyi Falade, said this during its 51st meeting held at Excellence Hotel and Conference Centre, Ogba, Lagos.

He said, “After due consideration of the cases of examination malpractice, the committee endorsed appropriate sanctions prescribed by the rules and regulation governing the conduct of the examination.”

According to him, the committee has endorsed the cancellation of the entire results of the candidates involved in the malpractice while some of them have been barred outright from writing any of WAEC-organised examinations.

Though he could not say how many candidates were affected, he noted that many of them, including some teachers involved in the act, were sanctioned.

“These sanctions include barring candidates from sitting for council’s examinations for certain number of years and reporting erring teachers to the appropriate authorities for disciplinary action,” he said.

He stated that the decisions of the committee would be implemented without delay, while affected candidates would be informed by the council’s national office.

NEC, which is the highest decision-making organ of WAEC, however, attributed the increasing rate of examination fraud to proliferation of private schools as a business venture rather than a social service.

According to Falade, there are many private schools that have been found to be involved in the act of examination malpractice to make money.

“We call on ministries of education to exercise their authority as supervisors of the education sector and endeavour to clamp down on schools that perpetrate or condone examination malpractice, whether public or private,” he said.

The committee also decried the habit of some community leaders and parents who had been found to always visit examination centres under the guise of monitoring the conduct of the examination but in reality engage in promoting malpractice.

Falade spoke about the decay of facilities in public schools, over the years, and noted that the anomaly had contributed to the decline in standard in the public schools, while calling on various governments to be more committed to the provision of quality infrastructure.

-Tribunewp_posts