*WE NEED CCTV CAMERAS IN OUR EXAMINATION HALLS ELSE, WAEC MUST GO*

*WE NEED CCTV CAMERAS IN OUR EXAMINATION HALLS ELSE, WAEC MUST GO*

The West African Examination Council has lost credibility as an examination body due to the way their examinations are conducted recently.

It is now obvious that education in Ghana has now been downgraded to just the passing of exam.

Teachers are responsible for nurturing children academically and morally. It is unfortunate that only a very few teachers acknowledge the latter and consider giving out answers to WASSCE candidates during exam and extorting as exiguous as paltry fiscal equivalence to be immoral.

In that public school I am teaching, I saw colleague teachers who thought helping candidates to pass the exam was a way of helping them and so took cameras of question papers and tried sending them to subject teachers outside to submit solutions into the exam halls despite the headmaster’s warnings.

If all subsequent exam should be conducted this way, of what relevance will it be for students to waste the time to study or stay in the classroom for the teaching and learning process?

What are we teaching our kids today? Only the shallow reasoning teachers do not realize that children are just children and that they consider anything from their instructors as right and so learn to practice them.
This is perhaps the reason for the high prevalence of corruption and robbery in our societies today.
It is pretty obvious that so many other schools are resorting to this way of passing exam.

This isn’t the time to blame any school or anyone for such acts except WAEC. If there were better systems put in place, non of these would ever happen.

99.9% of private schools pay their way in WAEC in order to cheat during exam.
WAEC has now proven beyond all doubts that the monies collected from candidates as exam fees are not enough to cater for the welfare of their employees and that allowing for mass cheating is now the lucrative way of filling their already superfluous pockets.

I got the opportunity to invigilate WASSCE in May-June 2018 in a private school but decided not to do it ever again because the rate of examination malpractice was opprobrious and disgrace to the ministry of education.

I know the honest ones who are witnessing the ongoing 2019 WASSCE exam in different schools can relate.

Before we got recruited, I had used the normal channel for application to be recruited several times but all to naught. Some so-called workers from WAEC took some monies from us and promised to post us to private schools where we could make some good money and they honored their promises.

During the period of the exam, Invigilators were rendered nugatory even when tablets and smart phones were been used in exam halls.

The so called external supervisors came around only to take their booty to support their hungry family and so had no better option than to be blind to what goes on at the exam centres.

Invigilators have to take some monies from the kids and in return, allow them to cheat since allowances for the whole period of the exam come in a year’s time and come only in a meager form.

The new slogan of WASSCE candidates is that “the exam is our life”, hence they ought to use any leeway available to pass. Woe betide the invigilator who comes across the way of such a desperate candidate.

Some headmasters deliberately leak questions to students just because they have to extricate their office from censure and chide from the public and education minister should the students’ results go bad.

You see? Everyone has a very good reason why examination malpractice must occur.

The truth is that non of these reasons far outweighs the fact that a country that allows examination malpractice is tantamount to producing engineers whose buildings collapse and kill zillions of citizens; doctors who kill patients through reckless mistakes; nurses who administer wrong doses to patients; accountants who render the country’s purse and that of other companies insolvent and many more quack professionals whose mistakes cost the country far more than our selfish gains in examination malpractices.

The latest research reveals that the cause of the Titanic ship’s wreckage on the April 14 1912 was because the captain of the ships captain Edward John Smith failed his exam in Navigation but managed to find his way on board forgetting his binoculars with which he could have seen the iceberg long before the gigantic ship bombarded the ice leading to its ultimate demise perishing as many as 1500 lives.

Albert Einstein failed his entrance exams but sat for the exam again before he finally got admission into the Zurich polytechnic.

Education should rather teach as to embrace failure for it is part of life.
The first incandescent light might not have been discovered at that time of Thomas Edison had it not been failure. He failed 10,000 times before he triumphed.

There is no doubt that the advancement of technology has made it more easier for examination malpractice to take place.

Not even trusted invigilators, external supervisors, the police, the depot and all other personnel’s used in ensuring zero malpractice can stop this menace because we are all like cloths in the boutique; we have our price tags. Everyone is compromised right from the WAEC officials to the common invigilators.

My recommendations:
On a chess board, if your opponent makes a good move, you also have to make a better one else you lose.

All am saying is that the way politicians scream on radio and televisions, the way civil servants and civil service workers cry for salary increments should all be channeled to calling on WAEC to expedite measures to counter check technology used in cheating in Examination, else we may not live that long to enjoy the social graces we have always yearned for.

Irrespective of how much it costs, if closed circuit televisions (CCTV cameras) are not used in exam halls from next year onwards, the WAEC examination results from both private and public schools should be considered incredible by our tertiary institutions if ONLY we all want to contribute to this special way of nation building. That way, the West African Examination Council should be dissolved so that we rely on a better examination body.
The president in one of his speeches said we should be citizens and not spectators. Ghana is the only country I can be proud of. I am only but a citizen.
Let us all also try to be citizens and forward this message across so that those who don’t know what is happening will know the danger that awaits Ghana if this menace remains indelible.

Remember this favorite quote of Albert Einstein:
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil but by those who watch and do nothing.

By: A concerned teacher