Impunity on steroids

 Reported assault on a vice-principal in Ondo State for daring to stop a pupil from cheating in the ongoing West African Senior School Certificate Examinations (WASSCE) shows just how audacious examination malpractice has gotten in our country. No longer is the deed done shamefacedly in secret. Cheats have acquired a sense of entitlement, and their sponsors a brazen disregard for conventional ethics. We are steeped in an age of the death of societal morality and in need of a sure compass to halt the slide and retrace back to the path of high probity. 

In the Ondo State incident, a vice-principal identified simply as Mr. Rotifa was, penultimate Friday, battered to near unconsciousness by thugs suspected to be acting on the instructions of parents of a Senior Secondary 3 pupil of Complete Child Development College, Awule in Akure. The pupil had against school rules taken an android phone into the exam hall, apparently to cheat, prompting the vice-principal to confiscate the phone. Reports said the pupil reported the matter to his parents, upon which the mother stormed the school to threaten harsh reprisal against anyone who dared to obstruct her son from cheating.

Ondo State Government issued a statement of preliminary investigation, in which it described the assault on the vice-principal as an affront to Nigerian education system and a dangerous precedent that threatened the integrity of Nigerian schools. According to the statement by Director of Schools in the state Ministry of Education, Dare Obajulaye, the encounter had its genesis on Monday, 26th May, when Rotifa confiscated an android phone found with the SS3 pupil, Wisdom Elisha, in the exam hall. The situation escalated when the pupil’s mother came to the school the following Thursday to verbally assault the school management and threaten violence if her son was hindered from cheating in future papers. Somehow, her threats intimidated the school management enough to direct that the phone be returned

The statement further said: “The brother of the student, who happens to be an old student, later came to the school to harass the vice-principal and threatened to deal with him. After school hours, the boys were seen loitering in the street, and the proprietor was informed, who told Mr. Rotifa to go to the police station to lodge a complaint. He (Rotifa) went, and two policemen took him in their van to look for the boys, probably for arrest. They couldn’t get them. As they were going back to the station, the boys waylaid the police van, stopped it, brought out Mr. Rotifa and beat him up. He was taken to the hospital for treatment.” It added: “According to the principal of the school, he (Rotifa) has been discharged from hospital, but he did not go back to his house for fear of the boys coming back for him. Further investigations and efforts to get the culprits are in progress.”

Ondo State police command subsequently reported that its operatives had arrested five suspects linked with the brutal assault on the vice-principal. Command spokesperson Olushola Ayanlade, a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), in a statement said following the assault, the police arrested the concerned pupil’s mother, Mrs. Dorcas Asije, and four suspected accomplices. “Acting on the directive of Commissioner of Police Wilfred Olutokunbo Afolabi, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Operations) led a tactical team to ensure their swift arrest. The case has been transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID) and will be charged to court upon conclusion of investigation,” he added. 

Many things suck about the whole matter. One is the audacity of the student and his family members in seeking to enforce criminal indiscipline against society’s rules, and the seeming helplessness of the school management in the face of barefaced lawlessness. You wonder, for instance, why the school management could not stand up for the vice-principal in his objection to the pupil’s bid to cheat, and rather ordered the release of the phone when the mother came in with her rant. The management also left it to the vice-principal to go lodge a complaint with the police by himself, when it should have been an institutional action. 

More disturbing is that the police couldn’t provide protection for the vice-principal despite being brought into the picture. No one expected them to use lethal arms indiscriminately against the thugs who waylaid the police van, but to have allowed those thugs hijack Rotifa from the van and beat him up mercilessly takes civility in police’s rules of engagement to an impotent level. It is indeed curious that police presence posed no deterrence whatsoever to the miscreants in carrying out their mission – almost like they demystified the fabled aura of police presence striking preemptive dread in persons with criminal intent. Sadly too, police involvement has not sufficiently guaranteed safety for the vice-principal as to enable him to return to his home after hospital treatment. So much smacks of supremacy of lawlessness!

“The endgame for school certificate exams by CBT is most welcome, but the rush to implementation leaves grey areas.”

Abuses that have characterised the WASSCE, notably the leakage of the English Language paper, gave resonance to government’s mandate to the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and the National Examinations Council (NECO) to migrate fully to computer-based testing (CBT) mode by May/June, next year. Education Minister Tunji Alausa first announced the policy in April while monitoring this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) by JAMB. “We are determined to eliminate examination malpractice by ensuring all exams, including practicals and essay papers, migrate to CBT. If JAMB can successfully administer CBT exams for over 2.2 million candidates, then WAEC and NECO can also do it,” he said. The minister directed that both bodies must begin conducting their objective papers in CBT mode from this year, and fully transition the remaining components accordingly by May/June 2026. “By their 2026 exams that will come up in May/June, both the objectives and the essays will be fully on CBT. That is how we can eliminate exam malpractice. We want our children to study and not go ahead to have a perfect way of cheating,” he argued.

While inspecting the conduct of WAEC’s CBT examinations in Abuja some two weeks ago, the minister restated government’s commitment to the mode migration. “We are working very hard to eliminate fraud in our exam system, and WAEC is taking the lead,” he said, adding: “We now have clear evidence that when exams are done using technology, the level of fraud is minimised to almost zero.”

Most stakeholders agree that CBT has the potential to curb malpractice and address logistical challenges often encountered by WAEC and NECO in conducting hard-copy examinations. But many doubt that the country is ready for rushed implementation. There is the question, for instance, whether the level of infrastructure is sufficiently robust to carry full scale computer-based testing in school certificate examinations. Among others, there’s the need for access to computer terminals by all candidates, steady power supply and strong internet connectivity. Unlike the UTME that is conducted at designated urban and semi-urban centres, school certificate examinations are written by pupils in far-flung schools, some of them in remote locations yet straining for the trappings of civilisation. Adequate infrastructure coverage needs to be ensured in all those areas. Besides, whereas JAMB conducts its UTME in just a day, school certificate examinations span nearly two months at each stretch and infrastructure coverage must be made to last the whole time. 

There’s also the issue of digital literacy of all prospective candidates as would guarantee that no area of the country – urban or rural, north or south – is disadvantaged. At the moment, there are some schools especially in remote rural areas where students who get presented for school certificate examinations have inadequate exposure to ICT, and educational justice could require that they first be formally updated in digital literacy to properly equip them for computer-based testing. Meanwhile, efforts must as well be made to safeguard the conventional rigour of examinations. Experts have argued, for instance, that while CBT works well for multiple-choice-type assessments, many disciplines require more complex forms of evaluation like essays, problem solving, diagrams and technical drawing presentations, among others. These forms are not easily adaptable to standard digital testing platforms, and a blanket implementation risks oversimplifying assessment and undermining the depth and rigour required in many fields.

Again, to make the point directly: the endgame for school certificate exams by CBT is most welcome, but the rush to implementation leaves grey areas. Let these be addressed before taking the plunge.