The Head of National Office, West African Examination Council (WAEC), Nigeria, Patrick Areghan, speaks on the recent successes recorded by the examination body, and other sundry issues, on the TVC ‘Morning Show’ monitored by JAMIU AFOLAYANKA

In our days, it took some months before WAEC results were released but today we learnt that it takes 45 days for results to be released. Talk to us about some of the basic changes in WAEC

Well, you can call that a revolution in educational assessment. Today, we have a massive deployment of technology in the conduct, processing, and release of results. Those days you will write your exams as you rightly said and you wait for a longer period before your result is released but today 45 days after the last paper, you have your result and 90 days after the release of the results, you have your certificate. This is possible because we have state-of-the-art facilities that we deploy in the conduct and processing of examination results. For example, when it comes to the printing of certificates, it takes just three weeks. We print almost two million certificates in three weeks. We have a state-of-the-art machine called the Ricoh machine printer. In three weeks, you’ll get your certificates; but Nigeria is a big country and we should be proud of what we have. We have set the pace. There are five member countries of WAEC, I can tell you that Nigerian always takes the lead. Nigeria is always the first to release results, although the date for release is set, we always meet deadlines and even the printing of certificates. Some other countries could have a backlog but Nigeria does not. We don’t have any backlog of certificates. For the school certificate exam as I said, 90 days after the conduct of the exam, you’ll have your certificate. And for the private candidate’s exam, we now have what we call the certificate management system, eCertMan, whereby the candidate applies online for his certificate; it is printed and sent to where you want to collect it. These are the major innovations we have introduced to ease the process and to aid our service delivery to the growing population of Nigerian candidates, yearning for WAEC Certificates. It is the massive deployment of technology that has brought this about which was not there in those days. Those days I had a misconception of how the examination body was operating. I always imagine how WAEC was able to coordinate the marking of all the papers. I used to think that WAEC was a spirit.

Cut in…WAEC was like a god at that time.

Well, because you are acquainted with what we are doing now; that is why your perception of WAEC has changed. That’s why WAEC is no longer god, but it’s still god for those who are out there seeking this thing… They still see WAEC as a god.

Cut-in…because like god, you don’t see the personality, you are praying, you don’t know whether he will answer your prayer or not.

Exactly, even those of us inside do not see all those processes. You go into the exam hall, you write your exam. That is the only thing the student knows. When we are conducting exams, we break the state. For each state, we break it into manageable units. We call them custodian points so that you’ll be able to transit between the collection point and the school where you’ll be supervising without taking much time. We give out papers one hour before the commencement of the paper, so this supervisor comes to the custodian centre, it’s a small unit. You can have about 20, 28, or 35 schools attached to that centre and once it is more than 27 schools attached to a centre, we put two stars there to be able to quickly attend to the supervisor. So, you collect your papers, you go to the exam hall, you conduct the exam and you’ll return these scripts to the custodian centre and then from there, we go daily. The allocation of the script to the examiners, you don’t even know the examiners, I don’t know them. When you allocate scripts to a particular examiner, for example, it may be going to Sam Omatseye, your name will not be there, is the number. At the marking venue when you go there, they will use your number to identify your parcel. That is when that parcel will have a name. For example, in the schools in Lagos State, you don’t mark their scripts in Lagos, they go to another state so that’s what we do to reduce the human influence. And I like to tell you that all over the federation, like this exam we just conducted we used over 79,000 examiners

You mean 79,000 examiners, how do you select them?

Yes, through schools. That is one of the reasons why some schools perform very well. In a school, for example, you can have about two, three, four, five, or six examiners. There was a school in Kano, when I was a Kano they had 12 team leaders. Not just examiners they have over 30 examiners in that school and they have 12 team leaders, how will such a school not perform well? If you are an examiner, you’ll teach better than the teacher that is not an examiner because you know what is required, and what the questions required these students to do. That’s why we appeal to schools, we appeal to the government; “send your teachers to the marking venue”. We have a three-day training exercise, even though…

When I was in school, we had two history teachers, who were examiners, who marked WAEC papers, one of them gave me an idea of how to answer WAEC questions. Don’t you think the students need orientation in this regard?

Beautiful, the Bible says my people perish for lack of knowledge. Many students fail because they lack knowledge. What you are saying now is precipitated in what we call chief examiner’s reports, it is there. At the end of every examination, after they finish marking, all the chief examiners will compile reports on their various subjects and this will be compiled into a book form. These reports contain the following: What are the strengths of the questions? What the students are required to do to pass, what they are required to do to avoid failure. All the strengths and weaknesses are put together including the right answers are there. It’s called the chief examiner’s report. You can buy it for your child, I bought it for my child and you can access it online.

Ooh, what if my salary is N30, 000 and I can barely feed myself, how do I get the money to buy the chief examiner’s report?

It’s just N2, 000 plus, it’s not costly and if you say education is costly then get ignorance.

How many parents or children know that there are such reports?

Many schools know. We encourage schools to buy two copies every year. Once they are registering their students for their exam we made them buy two copies of the chief examiner’s report and two copies of the syllabus. So they are expected to make copies available, If I’m teaching government now, you make a photocopy of the subject and give it to me, the one teaching English Language will make copies available for him. They cascade down to the students that way. And the students themselves can also buy.

Are they available, do students buy these things, and are they are aware?

The school authorities are supposed to tell them.

Do they?

We tell the schools some may, some may not. We tell the schools when we go on programme, we also tell the candidates. We’ve heard of special centres, if you want to pass WAEC there are certain schools you register and then you know that your result is going to come out in a certain way. Talk to us about this ugly development endemic in our educational system. I’m glad that this issue is coming up for discussion. Miracle centres exist only in the imagination of the individual, assuming that there are miracle centres. It is not in our dictionary, miracle centres are illegal as far as WAEC is concerned. They are non-existent. But there is no denying the fact that there are some schools that are miracle centres but to say that WAEC gives legal status to that, is not true. What happens is that we have some quack schools, especially private schools. There may be one or two government schools that fall into this category but the majority of them are private schools. In my categorization, I say upper private schools, private schools that are at the top, then you have middle private schools, then you have lower and the lower private school. So, you find this kind of illegal practice in the lower and sometimes in the lower schools. How do you see those centres, these are schools that do not do any teaching and learning. We call them examination centres, they are just mere examination centres. They bamboozle their way through, they get registered as operating schools, and they go through the ministry it’s interesting because I know you are going to ask me why did you recognise such a school?

Cut in…of course, you already know

It is not WAEC, it is the state Ministry of Education concerned. We cannot recognise any school that is not recommended to us by the state Ministry of Education in any state of the federation but we even go also to carry out a check before we can register or not register. And what happens, what some schools do is to go out and borrow science equipment from neighbouring schools and deceive you into recognising them, immediately you finish the inspection exercise they take them back. And you’ll discover that when the exam comes they have nothing. But you’ll now also ask me, what do you do? Yes, we descend on such schools, we carry out what we call a five-year inspection exercise, every five years we carry out an inspection of all the schools registered by the state. The inspection site but every examination diet we carry out inspiration inside. When we send you to Ikorodu for example, you go there, you go around schools. We say on the day of science subjects like chemistry or physics, go to so schools. Go and check if they have the facilities. When you come back, you write a report that they don’t have the facilities to take chemistry, and we will withdraw chemistry from there. So we have very robust monitoring and inspection system that enables us to classify schools, those that are qualified to take our exams and those that are not qualified to take our exams. And of course, when they perpetrate exam malpractice, you’ll see that that is their stalk-in-trade. Perpetrating exam malpractice they don’t ever get their results.

You have talked of the miracle centres and all the things that happened there but the roles of parents are very crucial in all of this, something like that. And Is’haq Oloyede himself the head of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has always talked about the complicity of parents. How do you guys handle it at the level of WAEC?

It’s still unfortunate that we still have gullible parents in the 21st century that can easily be deceived or mischievous. They are mischievous and they’re destiny destroyers. Those who don’t mean well to their children. You go out there to buy an expo or to source an expo for your children. You give your children money to source expo and they are attending good schools but when it is time to write their (WASSCE) West African Senior School Certificate Examination; you take them away. You take them to so-called miracle schools in a bush area, where they believe that WAEC inspectors will not come, Minister of Education inspectors will not come, they take them away (it’s like a pilgrimage) yes they embark on a pilgrimage. Especially, during JAMB they will come from the village and go to another village

Cut-in…because that’s what their parents also do, their parents also travel far to go and get healing (laughter), so it is the same thing. Their children are also going there to get their miracle.

Religious pilgrimage and educational pilgrimage (exactly) that is what they do nowadays. Some good schools lament, that they could have about 200 in SS3 but when it comes to enrolment time, it will just come down to about 90,80 or less, where are the rest? The parents have withdrawn them. They have taken them to the so-called miracle centres and they end up ruining the lives of these children. They throw their future into jeopardy because they will never get any result. We have a monitoring system even when we are not there, you think we are not there so you can do whatever you like, you write on the board, and you dictate to the candidates. You’re just wasting your time. For example, we have an app, we call (IDP), Item Differential Profile. If you cheated in the objective item test, we’ll catch you

How do you do that?

You’ll think that is impossible, in technology they say “whatever is thinkable, is doable” so we have done it and it’s in bits once your papers have been scored with the objectives, anyone that cheated will be detected. And so what we do, we now transpose that onto the essay paper, we now write out the centre numbers and the candidates’ numbers involved, we’ll now send it to the marking venues. Examiners look at these scripts to see if there is a correspondence between the objectives and the essay. I can tell you 99.9 per cent, there’s always a correspondence. So, that is how we guide them. It should even get to a point where you have to use biometrics so that Citizen James who’s 50 years old does not come and write for citizens in John who is just 17 years. Yes, biometrics is incorporated into the registration process. So, you can come into the exam hall unless with the connivers of the supervisor. You can do everything on earth, if the supervisor wants to sabotage you, he will just sabotage you.

Cut-in…because there’s a candidate even in one of the states now, where they said they found out that he wrote an exam in the university and his handwriting in that exam does not correspond with his real handwriting (laughter) maybe he did a 100 percent changed in handwriting (it could be the miracle).

We do all these things, we check your handwriting, and we check so many things. It’s not that you cannot read the same textbook, you cannot read the same notebook and write the same thing. No, you can write the same thing but we have a way of detecting it. So, there are two levels, we can catch you in the examination hall, you can come in with a script, anything is written, that is a script. You can come in with a textbook, you can come in with a cell phone and if you are caught, you’re going for it. But if you are not caught there and you think you are lucky, in case luck runs against you and you are finally caught, then some schools even some parents would come up with some flimsy excuses… but my child is very good. He was not caught in the exam hall…this is what somebody was telling me about two days ago. “But the school was not told that this child was involved in examination malpractices”. I said, “We don’t owe any school a duty to report examination malpractice to them”. If you go out of your way to tell the school that you caught this candidate in examination malpractice, they will start begging, you know the Nigerian way. So, they are not supposed to be told but the supervisor who’s conducting the exam in the examination hall, will fill the necessary forms and if the principal’s attention is required, there’s also a column, he will also complete.

But how do papers get leaked, that you see in the morning of the examination the paper is everywhere?

Permit me to say this before answering that question, there was another question that preceded the two levels, how do we detect examination malpractice, especially in the examination hall or at the marking venues? So, when you’re not caught in the examination hall and you would now be arguing but I was not caught, I was not caught. The examiners caught you at the marking venue. (Laughter). That is that. Leakage is a very bogus thing (okay). The ghost of examination leakage was buried as far back as the 1980s in Nigeria. There’s nothing again called examination leakage (okay)

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So what do we have?

Take it to the back, (okay) so examination leakage is set to occur when you know the questions. For example, a paper that will take place tomorrow. Today you know the questions, that’s leakage. Also reasonable hours before the commencement of the paper, that’s leakage. But once the paper commences or is about to commence, one hour before the commencement of the examination. We have already released the materials to the supervisor, they are no longer in our hands. So you can no longer talk of leakage, what you now have is foreknowledge.

That is what they call the rhetoric of disguise, what you’re saying is that it leaks but it doesn’t leak from us?

It didn’t leak, Let me tell you something, foreknowledge cannot happen before leakage, and leakage cannot happen after foreknowledge

Cuts-in…but leakage causes foreknowledge because when it’s a leak, we all have the knowledge

Leakage does not cause knowledge, let me tell you how they happen (okay). Now, something could leak from the press house, you said its leakage and once there’s leakage, there’s collateral damage which means everybody knows. You can no longer administer that paper or it may be administered but the credibility is no more.

So what you are saying in effect is that leakages occur when the question papers get to the schools, some of the teachers or the examiners may compromise with school authorities and leak the questions to the students.

xactly, what I’m trying to explain to you now. What do these bad supervisors do, they collect these question papers. Immediately, they get into the examination hall, you are supposed to show these envelopes to the candidates and invited about three of them to come and see that nothing has been tampered with it. These things are packed in securely locked security bags from the custodian centre, (I have explained to you, the meaning of custodian centre) to the examination hall and then we have a monitoring spirit, we call it (CIVAMPEMS), Candidates Identity Verification, Attendance, Malpractice, and Post-Examinations Management System.

So, how does that work?

The Candidates Identity Verification, Attendance, Malpractice, and Post-Examinations Management System is called (CIVAMPEMS), this is a tool that is used to monitor the movement of the supervisor from the collection centre down to the examination centre. But we’re human beings, I don’t want to talk about that. When you get to the examination hall, this device is used to take the attendance of candidates and to do some other things. So the supervisor opens the questions package, brings out the questions to distribute to the candidates and immediately he brings out his cell phone and snaps it. Some of these supervisors belong to syndicates, they have what we call websites, on Instagram, WhatsApp, and other platforms. They are paid patents, they post these questions to designated platforms, the candidates some of them subscribe to this platform. They openly advertise with their bank details and all that. They post these things, that is where others get it from and so they have a syndicate, they solve these questions and they start sharing. That’s what you call leakage, that’s what you see, that’s not leakage, that’s foreknowledge, we have already taken it to the examination hall and you ask yourself the question. The examination has already started, that is why we have many candidates failing now, the examination has already started, what time do you not have to assess and make use of it? That is why you see some of them, they don’t come into the examination hall at given time, there is a regulation. If you are 30 minutes late into the examination hall, you will no longer be allowed to write that paper. But how many supervisors enforce this rule?

Cut-in…but if it’s 30 minutes, I can take 20 minutes and read all I want, If I’ve already prepared…

That is because you are a fast reader, at their level, they’re still struggling to know how to read fast. In a society where everything works well, where everything works out fine, where everybody keeps to the rule. The examination is starting at 9am, everybody is supposed to be in the examination hall. So who’s going to be outside, some will wait for the other schools to start, they will stay somewhere and wait. So they have a syndicate in that hall that will post something and then those people outside will now pick it and then they will start running into the examination hall and I can tell you, many of them have missed the exam because once you are 30 minutes late, you are not supposed to write the exam again.

You said the assessment shows that the student’s performance was five per cent poorer than the year before and the argument for last year’s performance of 80 something percent was kind of nebulous. Some people said maybe it was because students were at home most of the time during the lockdown and that made them study more. What is your take on this?

That explanation was not nebulous at all it was very scientific. Look at it this way, there was complete compulsory locked down, so we all stayed indoors. You stayed with your children, you turned out to be an automatic teacher, you stayed with your children you became a teacher. You remembered that you read History, you started teaching your children history, you remembered you read English you started teaching your children English, I read Political Science, I started teaching my children government. That was what happened and many state governments were teaching using Radio, and TV. As for WAEC then we had two sources, we had what we called WAEC to connect and the Interactive Porta, we engaged the students regularly during the lockdown. Once you enrolled for our examination, you would have access to these two portals and we loaded these two portals with learning materials that these candidates had access to. So, from a multiplicity of sources, from the government source, from the parent source, then from the WAEC source. They had a lot and because everybody was already dealt with by this hydra-headed monster called Covid-19, nobody wanted to suffer a second disaster. Everybody wanted to make a success out of it and that was why that performance was high. It was quite scientific, it was not manipulated, it was based on the real performance of the candidates and then there was nowhere to go to be looking for expo remember (exactly) nobody went out to look for expo or Covid-19 will catch you, but today we are free [Laughter]

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Cut-in…or else COVID-19 will catch you, So COVID-19 became an examiner? [Laughter]

But today you’re a bit free, you can move, you can roam looking for this and that and by so doing… they were wasting their time.

We understand, that about 10 per cent of the results were withheld due to some malpractices or other things related to it. Talk to us about what becomes of a situation where results are withheld?

Let me attend to that first, how do WAEC catch candidates that cheated in the examination during marking? We give them specifications. Write these things out, they are well taught, they are seasoned examiners, and some have been marking for the past 20 years. Some mark not because of the money, there’s one professor in UNILAG, Prof Ike Mowete, he’s a chief examiner. He does not take one kobo from us, recently we gave him an award. So these are seasoned examiners that want to improve the educational system of this country and so…

What does he examine?

I think its physics, and so I’m not supposed to mention that here but because it’s on the positive side. Because we want to sanitize the system, do you agree that children who cheated in an examination should not have their results (yes I do) beautiful that’s what WAEC is doing and the public will now turn around to blaming WAEC? Once, you are caught being involved in examination malpractice your result will be cancelled. You dictated to them in the examination hall, you wrote on the blackboard or the chalkboard, so we caught them but when we go to the marking venue, all these things become very glaring, they wrote the same thing. When you are writing an exam, and you are having three, or four different handwritings in the same script. Is it possible?

Cut in…how possible is that?

That is why we have Item Differential Profile (IDP), so that is how we detect examination malpractices and so many other ways at the marking venue, you’ll just see a whole lot of them writing the same thing, the teacher who feels that he or she is helping these candidates is killing them

In such cases, do you cancel the entire centre?

If 100 candidates wrote an exam in the same hall and 99 of them cheated, the only candidate who did not involve in cheating will have his result. So, that one candidate who did not cheat will have his or her result released.

Cut-in…so the other people who had miracles and the miracles were taken from them [laughter].

So what do we do? This is the waiting period (yes). This is the investigation period now (okay) we withheld the results. That’s why we call them withheld results. We will now investigate, the WAEC staff committee and the National Office Staff Examination Committee will first all investigate and sift the chart from the grains. Those without solid evidence will be kept aside, those with evidence will now be pushed to the board. There is the Nigerian Admissions Committee, comprising lecturers from some universities, registrars of universities, and directors of education in the various Ministry of Education. They will now investigate them, they will tell us the ones they accept and the ones they don’t accept. So, at the end of the day those that would be left off the hook, will have their result listed and that will be around November this year, those who are eventually found guilty will have not just their entire results. Some it depends on the rules. For example, if a candidate comes into the exam hall with a cell phone, the candidate will have that particular subject cancelled.

Do WAEC map out the good schools that do well and the students that do well?

We don’t do that mapping, unless when you ask us to do analysis, but we know the good schools and the bad schools. If parents want to do a private candidate exam, I will advise parents to please let their children sit the exam in a very good school, that’s the only advice I will give.

It is the massive deployment of technology that has brought this about which was not there in those days. Those days I had a misconception of how the examination body was operating. I always imagine how WAEC was able to coordinate the marking of all the papers. I used to think that WAEC was a spirit