BY CHRIS OCHAYI
ABUJA—The use of Global System for Mobile Communications, GSM, by Nigerian students sitting for examinations have complicated moves by relevant authorities to effectively tackle examination malpractices in Nigeria, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, ICPC, has said.

The ICPC, in a statement yesterday, said the mobile phones are helping students to now decode examination questions with sophisticated hand-sets.

It noted further that answers to mathematics questions had been worked by unknown set of experts and then provided for willing students who in turn downloaded the answers into their different telephone as they sat for the examinations.

The anti-graft agency which made the observation during the last May/June, NECO and Jamb examinations, added that students were equally caught while mailing the prepared answers to their colleagues through GSM hand-sets, while examinations were going on, a reason many of the sets were confiscated from offenders.

A statement by Folu Olamiti, Resident Consultant to National Anti-Corruption Volunteers Corps, NAVC, an appendage of ICPC, regretted that that the measures put in place by examination bodies had not succeeded in deterring the students from engaging in mindless cheating.

The anti-graft Commission alleged that daring students would enter examination halls with hand sets stuffed with prepared answers and would be downloading answers from the sets into their answer sheets.

Members of the National Anti-Corruption Volunteers Corps, NAVC,  who monitored the examinations in Lagos reported that the students effected their criminal acts in connivance with teachers, invigilators and some school principals in most areas monitored.

The ICPC, according to NAVC Report, said the officials confiscated not less than 35 hand-sets of different grades from students who were neck deep in using the sets to cheat during examinations.

It said members of NAVC were specially trained to monitor examinations in Lagos West, Lagos East and Lagos Central and hence were able to decode all the tricks usually employed by students in cheating.

The ICPC said it observed that the greatest level of ingenuity in cheating were exhibited by the students during mathematics examinations in WAEC, NECO and JAMB such that some students stuffed answers to objective questions in the subject as well as prepared answers in the theoretical aspects.

The NAVC Secretary in Lagos, Prince Goodluck Obi, said, ”It is disheartening that the students’ have thrown caution to the wind to the extent that they have lost all sense of sanity, decorum and honesty while they freely engaged in vices like outright cheating, dishonesty, bribery amounting to corruption in all its ramification.

“It is against this backdrop that we in NAVC vowed to stop at nothing until examination malpractices in various forms and sheds are utterly eradicated in Lagos State and  in Nigeria  at large”

The NAVC had recommended to ICPC that subsequent examinations in WAEC, NECO and JAMB should involve security operatives with special military or para-military training extended to as many invigilators as possible who would be employed for the purpose of monitoring the examinations in Nigeria.