Mr Donald Tuor, the Upper West Regional Controller of the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC), has warned against candidates engaging in examination malpractices as some incidents of attempted malpractices had been reported from some centres in Wa.
He said the Council had put in place stringent measures including strict supervision to ensure sanity throughout the exercise and that anyone caught in the act of cheating would be dealt with according to the dictates of the laws of Ghana.
Mr Tuor issued the warning in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Wa on Tuesday in relation to the ongoing Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in the country.
He indicated that they had deployed their officers to some of the centres where they suspected that things might not go well.
He said during a monitoring visit to some of the centres in Wa, he realised that some teachers were “lurking” around the exam centre close to the exam halls and when they were interrogated, they “pretended they did not know candidates are writing exams there.”
“I have also been told that at the Wa School for the Deaf centre there is a bit of uneasiness there in the sense that some invigilators attempted to write things for the candidates to copy and one of the teachers who sent his students there did not allow it.
These are the kind of people that we want in the system, but as a result they threatened him and all that. If things like this continue, we will have to get the security services involved,” Mr Tuor explained.
He said his outfit had also received reports that the exam papers for some two centres in Wa were swapped and that could have adversely affected the candidates if not detected earlier since the exam papers had different codes for the different centres.
Mr Tuor described the start of the examination in the region as successful since they had so far not recorded any hiccups in the process.
A total of 7,637 females have registered to write this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in the Upper West Region against 6,937 boys who have registered for the exams.
Some 31 special students comprising 20 males and eleven females and 1,030 private candidates, consisting of 462 boys and 568 girls are also expected to write the BECE in the region.
GNA