Students now carry guns to exam halls, says Okpala, NECO registrar

For the past two years now, the National Examination Council (NECO) has consistently turned in poor results by candidates who participated in the council’s exams, thus giving many Nigerians cause to worry. While some link it with the society which places money far above education, others postulate that parents and teachers are neck-deep in the mess because some of the parents encourage their children and wards to indulge in all kinds of examination malpractices.

But NECO Registrar, Professor Promise Okpala says the above postulations are not far from the truth adding that even candidates have become so brazen that they bulldoze their way into the hall with dangerous weapons. Okpala in an interview with Daily Sun also said for the results to be good there must be coordinated efforts from all the sectors.
We understand some candidates now bring dangerous weapons into exam halls.

How do you handle such cases?
Our first advice is this, you don’t really enforce things. Try to observe .as much as you can. Don’t enforce. Last year, a lady monitoring officer called me from Abuja that she saw somebody with a gun. And I said, remember the rule. Don’t question him. Instead, can you politely leave the hall and look for the nearest police station to contact or alert the police. Explain to them what you have seen. And let them come back with you into the hall and politely show them the location. Of course, they accosted that person, and to do that, the person they must be armed as well.

In June last year, during Mathematics exam, somewhere in Rivers/Bayelsa, they thought the papers leaked and so they bought the papers only to discover it was the wrong papers they bought. So, by the time the exam was finishing, somebody brought out a set of AK riffle and started shooting. He didn’t shoot at people. He was just demonstrating, shooting in the air. Such a person you dare not talk to him. Some will even come and tell you that they have finished writing in the bush that you must take it. That is, a paper has been smuggled out from the hall. Then, some experts wrote it for them in the bush. Then they will come to you and say that you must take it. You must accept it even when you know that it is wrong. Accept it so that they will allow you to leave.

Of course when you come back here, we will separate the weed from the chaff
How do you know the difference?
Remember that the papers are documented properly. Then a group accosts you. Even if you are signing, you should be able to know how to sign because you are already aware that the game is up. Our answer sheets are coded which most people don’t know. And that is why we can detect impersonation, papers written outside.

Why the poor results?
These results are also a reflection of the quality of students coming out from the secondary education sector. The results call for a wakeup call and I am happy that the results are greatly sensitized. So many stakeholders are now much more keen in reassessing the state of the rot in the education sector. We should be much more interested than before in what happens in the classrooms. Are the children actually learning? Is somebody really teaching? You may have a teacher who is knowledgeable. That teacher may not actually be teaching. He may be exhibiting how much he knows. And that is why in the education sector, some people tend to argue that teaching only takes place when somebody has learnt. If nobody is learning, then the teacher is only exhibiting how much of the subject he knows. To make somebody really learn, a lot of things will come into play. You have to ask, how ready is that learner? His capacity to learn. His readiness will also hinge on
a lot of factors. Has he the necessary tools? Those tools include a conducive learning environment, conducive classrooms. Those things include textbooks. They include his state of mind. I am saying this because, you can lead a horse to the stream but the horse will refuse to swallow any troubled water. There are factors that are inherent in schools. How motivated are the teachers.

How comfortable are they? What is their qualification. When last did they receive trainings? There are factors associated with parents at home, particularly now that most students are day students. Does the child have a reading table at home? Does he really sleep conveniently? Are the parents interested in what happens in school? Are there people at home who can say let me see your school bag and know what is there? For us to improve the quality of learning, all hands must be on deck. It is not as simple as saying it is the students because the government may pay all the teachers salaries and allowances yet nothing will happen. Remember the type of exam we conduct is like an end product. So, if the salaries and allowances have been paid and the students don’t have textbooks, the end product is not likely to be good. If the teachers are doing their best reasonably well and the students are reluctant learners the end product is not likely to be good. For the end product to be good, for our results to really improve, there must be a coordinated efforts from all the sectors.

The government alone cannot do it. Currently, what is in vogue is government/private partnership, all stakeholders who will benefit from the education sector should come into play and tackle this problem seriously. Otherwise, we may not easily come out of the woods. However, like I have said, a lot of energy is being put in place in trying to revamp the education sector. Many people are already interested in what is happening. Since last year, many people are answering to this wake-up call. Many people are asking questions that border on how come the kind of result that is coming out of the O’level exams is so bad. But I will like to point out that we may not get a positive result immediately because the damage was not done in a day. So, it is not likely to be that these changes started because on the part of the government at the centre, there is what we call roadmap. It is a highly articulated education programme.

The implementation is being handled meticulously. And the good aspect of this roadmap is focusing on quality and standard. There is access equity; there is quality and standard; there is sourcing of funding and management and resources. But I will like to point out that those months are too short to get the results because getting the results is like going back. It is a process to revamp from the beginning. There are short term measures. There are also long term measures. So, while we say that the present administration in the education sector has identified these problems, they have to develop and articulate a good roadmap. They have started implementing it meticulously. The 12 months is still short for the members of the public to expect such a dramatic change. So, what we are wishing is that we will be consistent in pursuing different aspects of this roadmap with a view to making members of the public see the change in few years time.

One is still disturbed about the 236, 613 cases of malpractices vis-à-vis performance. That is 1.8 percent. What is responsible for that? Could it be that the use of members of the Civil Defence Corps increased the number?
The truth is that as you increase efficiency in the conduct of exams you will realize that you will be approaching the true assessment of people’s worth. As you increase the quality of the conduct of that your exam, as you ensure that each person is writing freely then you are approaching the real assessment. Part of the problem with an exam just as you must have pointed out, include, the fact that they are much more thoroughly supervised? Let us really appreciate that NECO as an examination body does not have its officers in the schools. We have at least 11,000 secondary schools in this country. So, even if you ask the gatemen, everybody to go, they can’t be there.

So, the arrangement in the conduct of the exam all over the world is that the schools themselves their teachers and vice principals and principals are invigilators. That is how it is done. That is a 32-day exam, each school supplies the list of their senior teachers so that before they finish exams, practically every teacher must have manned the hall one day or the other. NECO Staff begins from this office and then ends at a point where the last NECO staff is controlling about 15 schools or 12 schools. I mean in charge of them doing the exams. They hold their question papers there. So, each of the
supervisors from each school approach them in the morning, take the question papers, go to the schools, conduct the exams and return it in the afternoon and take another one.

These invigilators and supervisors belong to the school. They are responsible principals and teachers in the school. We realize that if care is not taken the schools will begin to behave as if they are competing with each other. It is not my own teachers that should fail. And so, you find the teachers and students who know these students already trying to be soft. So, last two years, we now felt it is important that we have somebody who is responsible to us to be in each centre. So, that led us to say ok let’s have members of the Civil Defence Corps and post them to every centre.

They are accountable to us. They are not accountable to the school principals. That must have minimized the misbehaviour in the hall. And then in this exam, because of our electronic method of registration, when you register you upload your photograph. So, in this particular exam what we did was that we had to send monitors who downloaded all the original photographs. So, when we now give you a booklet to go to SMM, Maiduguri, we give you all their photographs from this office. So, it is not just the photograph they are having there you are seeing because what they do is that when they upload and print out they will go and detach that photograph and superimpose another on it.

The one they superimposed they give it to a mercenary and superimpose a mercenary’s photograph on it. So, the mercenary will just show you the person at the exam centre. But somebody has to arrive from this place to that centre carrying the original photograph again. So, when that happens that was why the impersonation cases increased. When that happens nobody will tell you to run away. So, the point really is this, the issue of malpractice is so common here. It is something that is location based. In other parts of the world it is not as common. I am not saying they don’t exist. But here it is very common. Adults participate. Intelligent people, for five thousand they want to go and take it for another person. And so, it is becoming a culture that must be rooted out. And so as you battle some of these things that are problematic, the more you are closing in on them, the more you are approaching the real performance of  these students. Let’s paint a hypothetical scenario.

A situation where each centre has a very big hall because part of the problem we are experiencing is that most schools don’t have a hall. They do it in classrooms. A school of 200 students may have eight classrooms. And so the invigilator comes. He can’t split himself into eight places. Even some schools with halls, if you leave them they will go to classrooms because they know that it will give them advantage of over cheating. You can imagine a scenario where we have the opportunity of allowing all students to go to exam hall where they can sit very well like people taking exam and then bring in outsiders to go and stay there with them for 24 hours, you will realize that this result will be worse than what it is.

Because of the numerous handicaps we have in conducting an ideal exam, it influences the results. It makes it bloated positively. And so, the introduction of people for the first time in the last July exam, people who were asked to go and stay in that hall on continuous basis on our behalf, it will reduce issues of misbehaviour in the hall. And, of course, such a reduction only means that the students will be allowed to write the exam on their own. So, that is really the whole thing. We still have a lot of problems we are struggling with. Problem of insufficient manpower and insufficient vehicles. Because when you are conducting exam all over the country, you can imagine what it will take to post people who are not under your payroll to go to a location and stay for 32 days because they want to stay there and watch over the students and report back to you, it is a lot of money.