WAEC-run senior secondary schools’ final exams have recorded a soaring degree of success in the last decade, but an analysis of years of data reveals a worrying trend: cheating has grown at remarkably similar pace.
The data suggests that improved pass rate in the last eight years has been driven by rampant examination malpractice, a Pluboard review finds.
Between 2016 and 2023, the pass rate for the external examination, which is a prerequisite for university admission, soared from 53% to 79.8%. During the same period, the exams body said the number of results it seized on suspicion of cheating also grew from 8.9% to 16.3%.
The success rate reached a peak in 2021 when 81.7% of the candidates passed. A year later, cases of cheating also peaked at 22.8%, according to our analysis.
WAEC did not provide the figure for withheld results in 2018. The exams body said the level of malpractice that year was similar to previous years. To account for the missing figure, we took the average for the two preceding years.
– A troubling trend
The West African Examination Council measures success when a candidate obtains credits in at least five subjects, including in English Language and Mathematics. On average, between 1.5 million and 1.6 million wrote the exams each year since 2016.
In 2017, 59.2% of all candidates passed while 50% passed in 2018. The rate rose in the next year and continued to soar annually, falling slightly in 2022 before rising again.
The number of seized results followed the similar pattern. It stood at 11.3% in 2019 and fell slightly in 2021 before rising again.
– A cheating problem
Cheating has plagued major university examinations in Nigeria. The biggest tests are the WASSCE conducted by WAEC, Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination conducted by JAMB and the NECO-administered SSCE.
The figures do not confirm definitively that observed higher success rates are associated with increased cheating. But WAEC has lamented the rising spate of malpractice in its exams.
In June, the council said the situation became worse because supervisors were aiding candidates to cheat.
“Supervisors are our problem; 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?” Patrick Areghan, head of WAEC’s office in Nigeria, said in June.
“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,” he added.
He told journalists while monitoring the exams that more than 15 people, amongst them candidates, supervisors, school proprietors, were arrested.
He said supervisors frequently photograph exams paper and send to candidates ahead of their arrival at the centres.
“We have a regulation to release papers to supervisors one hour before commencement time to enable them to go from the collection point to the administrative point because of distance in some schools,” he said.
“But what they do is to snap the question papers and send them to their syndicate groups.
“Candidates are already in the exam hall and you are posting the questions. Sometimes, they change the front of the questions and add 2023 for exam questions of 2020,” he said.
– Latest results
In the latest 2023 results released on Monday, the exams body said it withheld the results of 262,803 candidates, representing 16.3% of total.
Be blamed the rampant cheating on candidates’ refusal to study.
“The reasons for this are not far-fetched. Candidates are no longer ready to study, they lack self-confidence and preparations for examinations are poor. There is over-reliance on the so-called ‘Expo’, which is non-existent.
“Candidates got frustrated when they got to the examination hall and discovered that all they had celebrated was fake. This has pitiably led to some of them failing the examination,” he said.
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