Why NECO results improved – Okpala

Comparing the performance of students in NECO’s SSCE for the last three years, this year there has been a tremendous improvement. What is responsible for this? What is responsible is not just an immediate thing. Around 2009 the result of this organisation showed that performance was not anything good; it was below 10 percent. It […]

Comparing the performance of students in NECO’s SSCE for the last three years, this year there has been a tremendous improvement. What is responsible for this?

What is responsible is not just an immediate thing. Around 2009 the result of this organisation showed that performance was not anything good; it was below 10 percent. It happened again in 2010 and it appears that Nigerians were jolted. There was a national outcry, many people initially wondered whether we were just out to embarrass anybody and we were called to various quarters to come and defend the result.
But the whole result was so sensitive that the President had to call a summit which he personally presided for over eight hours. This had a multiplier effect: there was increased budgetary allocation. They said he should declare state of emergency in Nigeria having seen that type of level of performance. On the part of my organisation we insisted that we were describing what we had seen. We had to say we had evidence, the scripts were there for people to see. So people started reacting with a view to saving the system. A lot of national summits were called by the ministers of education and it had in attendance commissioners for education, traditional rulers, students. People came together and increased the effort they were making towards recovering the system.
Naturally you would know that the decadence started many years ago and it is more difficult to rebuild, particularly if it has to do with human resources. If it is physical infrastructure, once you have all the money available to you, a village can be transformed into a modern city within the shortest time possible. But it is not possible for you to recreate human behaviour that way and so that time we called for patience, we called for sustained interest from stakeholders and sustained input.
So what you are beginning to see, by last year, our report we were all excited. This year again when we were bringing all the data together and the pattern started forming we were excited because it shows we are in a recovery process. So as it is now, it is clear that if we are to measure quality education using student performance in public examinations then this index is an acceptable index; we are at the recovery stage.
So it is the concerted effort of all stakeholders ranging from the President himself, the ministry officials, the ministers, the Senate and House Committees on Education, the commissioners in various states, parents, practicing teachers and students themselves. But while we have entered the recovery part, we should make sure that it is sustainable, we should not easily relax. It is easier to destroy a system than to recreate and recover a system, particularly if it is modifying human behavior.

The highest level of examination malpractice in this year’s exams is in cheating at the examination and marking venues. How are you full proofing the system?
What we can do is to not create conditions that would not encourage them. For instance in the course of conducting the exams we should ensure they don’t sit body to body because that way you can create an environment that is tempting. On our part we would increase what we call accreditation and re-accreditation. It requires our going to school to see whether the school is good enough with respect to our conducting exams. Inspectorates can go into a school with a view to ascertaining the extent to which they have everything it takes to teach.
Our own component is we get into a school that we want to anchor our exams to check halls, seating arrangement so we would make sure that our accreditation team is much more thorough than before. We would also make sure that in the course of conducting the exams we monitor the schools more intensively.
As at today we use lecturers in higher institutions to monitor our examinations. We also use Nigerian civil defence group to monitor and these are responsible people. The lecturers in tertiary institutions value the quality of certificates  and they value education. They are part of the consumers of our products and so they may not easily be derailed in terms of allowing somebody to acquire a credit when he does not deserve it.
So some of them are there using biometrics machines, some are using paper and pencil and within the 40 days of this exams he must visit each of the secondary schools under his jurisdiction three times and we expect a report which the supervisor in the school must countersign.
The civil defence group’s duty is to report on less difficult issues like taking note of when exams started, movement in and out of the halls and watching the general conduct of the exams.
However, the greater work should come from the teaching room. Fundamentally, no one would need to engage in malpractice if he is sure of what he has learnt. So if we really want to knock out exam malpractice the students should be prepared to the best of quality and at that point if they see malpractice support coming in they would say we do not need it; we are sure of what we are going to write.
The parents also need to provide a conducive learning environment like, do they have textbooks, place to study; has the child slept and eaten well…so there are rules.
All the inputs must be at their best such that the children would march into the exam hall with maximum confidence. With that even the mentality of working about to get undue support would vanish.
 
36 schools were sanctioned for issues bothering on examination malpractice and they were de-recognised for two years. Is this enough sanction and why weren’t the names of the schools mentioned?
The essence of it is not really to destroy but to recover. For instance if you go and give five years that school would not recover because as it is now, it means for two years they do not present candidates. It means that those candidates would leave your school; you can imagine what is involved.
There is a limit to which you can go. Our ultimate intention is to use it as a teaching tool. We believe two years is good enough to jolt the managers of the school to know that there are things you do not do and we go to that level when the malpractice is at the level of maximum cooperation with everybody involved in the school. Our target is to reform.
We follow a procedure: the first thing we would do is write the schools. They would have discovered that they do not have results by now. We write them to give them a chance to respond. When they come with their evidence we would sit and talk. Gradually after all this we would release the names. This way is a better management of crisis.

What challenges did you face conducting examinations in the North East considering security problems there?
Nobody studied how to conduct exams in a war situation but this is what we found ourselves in and we had to begin to adapt. We couldn’t make phone calls easily and communication is very important in our logistics. We took more risks but we were lucky, WAEC was not as lucky. People had to relocate, to go and stay close to a school such that within the few 45 minutes of curfew starting you would have rushed to the nearest place to stay. We thank God we did not lose any person as a result of insurgency but we spent more money in those states.

At the last National Council on Education meeting NECO was directed to release backlog of certificates, since 2008. Have you done that?
I told them that in the shortest possible period they would get 2009/2010 and then before their next meeting next year they would get 2011/2012. As at now 2009/10 has been released and the other ones, the various committees are trying to scrutinize them. My target is to clear all the backlog before I sign out in 2015.