This talk about WAEC exams fraud
It has been repeatedly reported in the local media that the country’s examining body, the West African Examinations Council dubbed WAEC has been trading examination marks, especially to students who always perform poorly, in the respective public examinations such as BECE or WASSE.
In most cases, as reported, parents collude with the examining body to accredit marks to their children with the former paying huge sums of money so that their children could have space in tertiary institutions or universities in the country.
Even the new technology introduced for candidates to access their results on the net known as ‘scratch card’ is all part of a grand ploy to fraud the unsuspecting candidates anxious to know their results.
There have also been rumours that WAEC would always avail itself when asked to provide fake examination certificates to people intending to travel outside this country for education purposes. Some of these fake documents have been presented by the holders mostly seeking employment; others have presented theirs at interviews for entry into universities in Sierra Leone.
These fake certificates have by and large been discovered in colleges across the country but with no remedial action taken other than turning the rogue candidate away.
All these allegations in the media have been out rightly dismissed as rubbish by WAEC. Council has even challenged the authenticity of the sources of the allegations although council is yet to bring any court action against their accusers.
While this has yet to be done, the persistent reports in the media about WAEC trading in exams marks for a fee should be a cause for concern.
Recently, this medium published stories about council’s involvement in the sale of grades in this year’s BECE and WASSE.
These are stories that are hard to verify for reasons of confidentiality. The media is also guided by their own ethics – that of protecting their source. So even when WAEC will ask the media to prove its source, it is very likely to hit the impossibility.
This creates room for WAEC to maneuver freely its way out of these allegations, leaving the media groping in the dark for tangible evidence.
But like we pointed out earlier, when the rumours persist it should be a cause for concern. Stories about the sale of fake certificates for dubious reasons and the sale of marks to individual candidates in public exams allegedly by WAEC are frequent, and this state of affairs, whether true or not, affects the credibility of council as well as the exams council conducts.
It therefore becomes imperative that council does something urgent to cleanse its image so that public does start losing faith in our public exams.
This is just a word of advice, take it or leave it.
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