By Isaac Massaquoi
I've been waiting for years for Sierra Leone's normally vibrant Civil Society market to come up with a group called CAMPAIGN FOR CLEAN PUBLIC EXAMS or CCPE. They can easily craft out their own mandate in a crowded market where such groups continuously overlap in what they set out to do.
So for starters, let me throw this in: The CAMPAIGN FOR CLEAN PUBLIC EXAMS should start by conducting a simple perception survey to determine what the people of Sierra Leone think about the performance of the West African Examinations Council, WAEC, in terms of their efficiency and the integrity of their products; next should be an audit of the staff capacity of the organisation, by staff I mean both permanent and casual ones; the final exercise should be a complete systems audit, in partnership with the Anti-Corruption Commission.
Right, we are not likely to have a coalition of this type soon because the eyes of Sierra Leone are focused on the war on Ebola. And rightly so. But let's not forget that the last institution we can neglect and allow to rot is WAEC. And I am not suggesting that there is a crisis there at the moment, I am saying that this country must act really fast to put a stop to certain trends in that sector clearly telling us that something is not right. People don't like talking about such issues in public but what's the point of having a newspaper and then shy away from asking tough questions.
Recently, WAEC confiscated about 2,000 results, promising to review them before making a statement to the public. WAEC wasn't very clear, but the suggestion was that malpractices were suspected. No well-meaning Sierra Leonean would criticise WAEC for taking action against attempts to cheat in one of the most important public exams in this country. But what I am terribly uncomfortable with is the fact that since those results were confiscated, WAEC hasn't found time to come back to the nation, either to explain the outcome of their promised review or to say what actions they have taken to end exam malpractices. Those candidates whose results were confiscated have now lost out and they could - rightly or wrongly - be described as examination cheats. That's why I am complaining.
For as long as WAEC has existed, candidates have found ways of cheating their way to success. And governments have made attempts here and there to stop cheating in public exams but things are simply rolling on with WAEC sporadically confiscating results and issuing press releases promising action. To me it's one of those situations in Sierra Leone where authorities talk and promise fire to satisfy an anxious public but do absolutely nothing.
In 1977, Nigeria experienced what was dubbed "Expo 77". There was massive cheating in public exams and unspecified actions were taken to correct the situation, including, I think, a public inquiry. In 1982 there was a wholesale confiscation of GCE O' Level results in this country. There are many Sierra Leoneans who were never able to go back to school and retake the exam. That was the end of their education. Can anyone tell me what the government then did apart from confiscating those results?
Many WASSCE candidates are cheating their way into tertiary institutions - and probably through them - and it seems to me that unless something drastic is done, and quickly, we may reach the 1982 situation again when the life of a whole generation of high school students would be held up for at least one year.
WAEC has a share of the blame. My information is that they pay their staff very bad salaries, even by Sierra Leone standards. The situation of their casual examiners is worse. I have seen details of all salaries at WAEC for permanent staff and casual workers, including examiners' pay. It's simply a disgrace. Nobody expects them to be paid salaries like big corporate organisations, but there's just the risk that when people who do such highly sensitive jobs are treated the way WAEC treat their staff, the system could be corrupted for private gain.
An examiner friend of mine who is now out of the country, told me of many experiences he had with candidates from all over the country whenever it was time to mark WASSCE papers. He was an English Language teacher. In one particular incident he narrated to me, four young girls - none of them more than 17 years old - came to his place in Freetown on a Sunday morning just as he was busy marking their scripts. He said they came from somewhere out of Freetown to negotiate with him to help them pass the English Language paper. He said the girls told him the principal of their school identified him as their examiner. They offered everything.
According to my friend, when he checked their scripts once they had left, he found out that two of them had clear passes while the others failed miserably. It turned out that the principal was a close friend to my examiner friend. When he complained to the principal about the embarrassment he had caused him by sending them to compromise him, the man simply told my friend to "ignore" the girls if he couldn't help them.
Naturally, my friend felt very badly let down by a man who ought to be an embodiment of academic and moral discipline. A man in whose hands parents entrust the future of their children and the nation. And for many private schools these days, parents pay a fortune for such services. This is not some story concocted by a columnist to help drive his message, it's a fact.
Have you ever wondered why parents accompany their children to examination centres during the NPSE? On the face of it they are very caring parents who take their kids to those centres and then decide to stay there until the exams are over, to boost their morale. That's not bad. The reality, however, is that some of those parents go there to interfere with the exam using badly-paid WAEC invigilators. And I am not the only one saying this. As always with such things, it is very difficult to bring forward any evidence but let someone please explain to me why those parents find it necessary to spend all their time outside examination halls when in normal times they don't even drop their children off at school?
In my time at the selective entrance exam, my uncle took me to the gates of the FSSG early that morning, pointed to a handful of other candidates standing at the gate near the Youyi Building end and told me to join them. That was it. That was a long time ago, but in the last five years this business of setting up camps outside examination centers has taken on new and dangerous proportions. It must stop!
WAEC's problems with keeping their exams clean have been compounded by the explosion in technology. And make no mistake, children as young as 11 years can handle iPads and mobile phones in unbelievable ways. Like their elders in tertiary institutions, they can do all sorts of things with it right under the noses of the most vigilant of invigilators. Let's not talk of invigilators who are compromised by those parents outside the examination centre.
In all this, I make the following points: In the first place, keeping public exams clean is a very serious and difficult job, made even more complex by technology and the powerful interests and syndicates now involved. Instead of constantly trying to help their children cheat and get good grades, parents must play their role to restore integrity to all public examination bodies. It is not enough to confiscate 2,000 results, make a lot of noise about it and forget about investigating to find out how such exam malpractices occurred with a view to eventually punishing those responsible. As long as WAEC concentrates on the candidates to the exclusion of the criminal syndicates behind the sleazy enterprise, exam malpractices will continue with amazing sophistication.
When the last group of candidates whose results were confiscated threatened to go to court, I was very happy in the hope that just maybe the criminal syndicate would unravel this time. But it would appear as if their protests were largely media-driven and badly coordinated and WAEC's response was simply to issue a press release promising action. They went back to sleep.
The Gbamanja Commission which investigated why so many children failed the WASSCE of 2008, made some interesting proposals. But we are living in times when there is so much pressure on young people to get top grades amidst all the distractions of After-BECE jams and violent cliques, dissatisfied teachers and absentee parents of large families and all that. The signs on the horizon are not good - and they are not new.
(C) Politico 02/09/14
