On the Massive WASSCE Fraud

The 2015 West Africa School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) was tainted by massive malpractices that have caused the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) to be investigating some principals while some schools are reported to have been banned from hosting the WASSCE pending the ACC investigation.

Nearly two thousand results were cancelled while eight candidates were banned from taking the exams for scoring distinctions in all their subjects. I am not surprised by such an ugly academic development; the rampant grade-selling, illegal admissions and other forms of academic vices must have led to the WASSCE catastrophe.

The overt commercialization of our educational system has caused many pupils and students to be illegally climbing the academic ladder. Many pupils or students pass their exams without meriting the grades which are often sold to them by some unscrupulous teachers and lecturers.

Some of our sixth form pupils cannot read or write simple English, a situation which keeps me wondering how they found their way to such a class. When such pupils face the WASSCE, they are highly inclined to involve in examination malpractices, otherwise, they know their brains cannot allow them to succeed. If pupil cannot pass a lower exam, how do you expect that pupil to pass a higher examination?

Many teachers nowadays are more interested in money than in the academic development of the pupils. Many of these teachers resort to teaching not because they love the job but because they want to survive the biting hardship in the country. They just use the classroom as a waiting room for higher and more lucrative jobs.

As earlier stated, illegal admission of pupils is another major problem in schools; when a money-hungry principal admits failed pupils for brown envelops, he or she must expect mass failure and massive fraud in the WASSCE. Clever, studious and successful pupils hardly involve in examination malpractices; most of the examination malpractices are surely perpetrated by mediocre and failed pupils who are very much aware that they can never go through the examination by their intelligence.

Until grade-selling, illegal admissions and other academic vices are drastically minimized in schools, there will always be massive malpractices in the WASSCE and other public examinations.

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