Why Cheating is commonplace among Nigerian students

[Richard Akindele]

The Nigerian school system is modeled after that of Britain whereby students are given a fixed set of courses to take per semester, and every course must be passed to advance to the next level.

Compared to other systems, such as what obtains in America, acquiring an education in Nigeria can be a very stressful and expensive proposition.

In America, you decide how many courses you want to take during any given semester. That means you can take anything from a single course, to any number of courses that you can handle.

Every career/profession has courses that must be passed in order to graduate. Therefore you can take things slow with fewer courses per semester, or you can get on the fast lane to graduate early.

A typical Bachelor's degree program takes 4 years to complete. But depending on your needs, you could extend that to anything from 5 to any number of years.

On the other hand, you could take extra course work each semester and graduate in less than 4 years. I've seen bright students make it in only 2 years.

One other advantage that the American system offers is that you don't have to be wealthy to go to school. You can take any number of courses to match your budget.

There are so many brilliant Nigerians out there who can't afford to go to school due to the cost. If we discarded the current all-or-nothing educational system, more people can afford the fees.

Furthermore, there are reports of rampant exam malpractices among Nigerian students. The problem exists at all levels: Primary School Leaving Certificate, JSCE, SSCE, JAMB, and even on regular school tests and exams.

One can rationally conclude that some students cheat because the workload is simply too heavy to bear. And if they fail a course, the whole semester must be retaken, even if most of the courses for that semester have already been passed.

In a bid to pass every course in a semester, many students engage in mere memorization, to be regurgitated during an exam. Once the exam ends, everything crammed evaporates into thin air. Memorization is one thing, understanding what you're reading is quite a different thing. That may also explain why many of our graduates don't know much.

Our academic system is not very smart.

I hereby implore the minister of education and academic planning to eliminate, or at least modify our current inefficient system, and replace it wholly or in part with the American system.

[Richard Akindele]

AN ironic twist has been added to the desperate search for solutions to the pandemic of examination malpractice in the country.

Recently, the registrar and chief executive of the National Examinations Council (NECO), Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, authorised the council's invigilators and other officers to accept bribes if, and when, offered by desperate students, their parents or schools. The bribe is to persuade the NECO personnel to look the other way while the bribe givers' wards and pupils perpetrate exam malpractice in exam halls and pass their Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) by foul means.

The measure is to save lives of NECO personnel subjected to frequent and deadly attacks by persons desperate to pass their SSCE by all means.

In the last two years, NECO officials had been splashed with acid in Ebonyi State. And in Bayelsa, some 'intransigent' NECO personnel bent on ensuring fraud-free SSC examinations were grabbed and thrown into the creeks of Niger Delta for refusing financial inducement. Similarly, prospective exam cheats had opened fire and gunned down a NECO driver around Gombe, in Gombe State.

Since this is so, the NECO's counteraction may be rightly seen as "bribe-for-life". In the face of clear and present danger, NECO officers are officially permitted to cooperate with evil-minded criminals bent on perverting the law.

Even so, the order to accept the bribe appears to be illegal and capable of enriching private pockets. It is neither of these. NECO's mandate to its personnel is: "Just collect (money offered) with the caveat that such illegal collections be reported to the council."

In the last examination conducted by NECO, Ojerinde calculated that about N120,000 was given to staff of NECO to manipulate the exam process. The amount was paid into NECO's accounts and the schools involved were sanctioned.

The acceptance of the bribe could not be said to be illegal, since the official investigation technique is akin to "marked money" adopted in investigating similar criminal cases. The measure is even likely to prove to be efficacious. If the bribe-givers come to know that they are bribing in vain, that they will forfeit their bribe money, and their exam scores cancelled, they will stop offering bribes.

The real fear of the technique is the possibility that a few criminal-minded NECO officials may exploit this caveat to perpetrate exam malpractice of their own making. This is where the danger lies, and why NECO and its leadership have to be extra careful and diligent to be able to separate the chaff from the wheat.

We say this because of proven instances where actual exam malpractice begins with the active connivance and complicity of examination officials who leak question papers and go ahead to perfect exam frauds with the computers and files in their head offices.

However, this fear is allayed by the realisation that with the mandate to accept bribes with the intent of reporting them, all stakeholders in the huge infrastructure of cheating, falsifications and alterations that constitute exam fraud, will henceforth be put on notice that their actions may be exposed. This underlines the NECO directive which may turn out to be its major deterrent factor against exam cheats since none can be sure anymore, both bribe-givers and takers.

Therefore, all things considered, we commend NECO for this innovation in checking the scourge of fraud in our exam halls.

Further, the NECO, in this new spirit, along with WAEC, its closest competitor, should focus more on tightening its internal security and checks where, reportedly, the actual cheatings are initiated and perfected.

Parents, teachers and school heads who collude with exam officials to cheat are better advised to take the straight and narrow path to academic laurels rather than the broadway of perversion that leads to the ruin of nations.

It is a sad and sorry commentary on the quality of graduates that qualify from our institutions of higher learning that many of them are today believed to have cheated to gain admission and continued cheating till they graduate.

The negative contribution and impact on the nation's commonwealth of these 'educated illiterates' has been too obvious with us in recent time when exam malpractice pervades all school and professional examinations.

Lethal attacks on NECO personnel, and bribe offers to them, by exam cheats, are a measure of decay in the country's educational system. It is an extraordinary problem that demands unique and creative solution, such as NECO's.

Daily Champion