Exam Cheats Are Everywhere in the World

In 1981, when I graduated from Okwawu-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School, our General Certificate of Education (GCE) Ordinary-Level results were cancelled as a result of suspected cheating throughout the country. Significant to note was the fact that our results had been cancelled because PERSCO, as St. Peter’s is popularly known, had scored the highest in the entire country and, perhaps, in the whole of the Anglophone West-African Subregion as well. This was not the least bit unusual because throughout much of the 1970s and the 1980s, PERSCO had only a handful of competitors or rivals in the country, among them the Presbyterian Secondary School (PRESEC), near the campus of the country’s foremost tertiary academy, the University of Ghana, Legon, and the Cape Coast-based Wesley Girls’ High School – popularly known as WeyGeyHey – and then the Mfantsipim School, also located in Cape Coast, the first and oldest of its kind to have been established by indigenous Ghanaian citizens in 1876 or thereabouts. Mfantsipim was also founded on Methodist religious and ideological principles.

My graduating class will be vindicated the following year, when the PERSCO Class of 1982 scored even higher than we had scored the previous year, which effectively removed every iota or shadow of doubt that St. Peter’s was, indeed, handily or readily the best secondary academy in the country. The whole of Anglophone West Africa, to be certain. But by then, of course, the damage had already been done. Any PERSCOBA or Perscovite would be the first to tell you, the Dear Reader, that, for the most part, we never set our naked ungoggled and “uncontacted” eyes on any leaked exam questions while I was in attendance from 1976 through 1981 and well after. That was also when St. Peter’s was the secondary to envy and at the apogee of its academic and institutional prowess, as one of our History teachers, Mr. Yaw Frimpong, would readily have let on to anybody who cared to know.

What was standard fare at the time was that the City Boys – often this would be Perscovites resident in any of the regional capitals, such as Koforidua, Kumasi and, of course, our nation’s capital of Accra – would return home shortly before the start of our GCE exams and arrive back on campus in about a week or two later with copies of what they often claimed to be the Real McCoy, that is, a real or an authentic exam paper or package for that year. They would charge a fee for allowing us to take a peek at these sets of purported “Apo” questions. Alas, almost invariably, these exam papers would turn out to be duds. Fake exam questions. Once, we even discovered to our cynical disdain that what was being passed off and around as the “Apo” or authentic question papers for the 1980 English Literature “O”-Level Exam had actually been given to exam candidates in 1972, that is, a dozen years before. So, we never trusted any touts who claimed to be in possession of the Real McCoy come GCE “O”-Level time. I suspect the same was also the case with our Sixth-Form senior students. It would not be until I attended Prempeh College, between 1982 and 1984, that I was shown exam papers that really turned out to be the Real McCoy in the examination room or center.

Which was why when I re-sat the “O”-Level exam at Prempeh College in 1982, I was the only candidate who scored “Grade One” on the Commerce exam. The second highest scorer was Michael Mawuko Afadzinu, a regular Prempeh College student, who scored a “Grade Five.” As it turned out, Prempeh College students had had an original copy of the Commerce exam questions sold to them beforehand, which they had collusively and collaboratively copied from one another. Based on the Algorithm that Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister of Education, recently hinted at, which is routinely used by the and supervisors of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), it had been detected that I was the only student in an examination room of approximately 100 students, who had not participated in this cheating game which I had earlier on learned was standard practice at Prempeh College.

You see, a significant percentage of the Prempeh College teachers or masters, as we called them, were WAEC-certified examiners, which meant that unlike the rookie National Service Teachers at St. Peter’s who constituted an overwhelming majority of the teaching staff, the much older and more experienced Prempeh College teachers often had advance knowledge of what was to be expected in the exam room. I strongly suspected that they infused their Mock Exam Questions with some of the real sets of questions that had been scheduled to appear on the final and real exam. You see, the exam papers were often delivered at least a couple of weeks to approximately a month before the GCE exams, both the Ordinary Level and the Advanced Level (A-Level) began. At St. Peter’s, we did not have such a luxury or privilege, depending on how the reader chooses to envisage the same.

Since the assumption of the democratic reins of governance by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, it has become readily obvious that our Senior High School Students were apt to perform significantly better than they had under the watch of the previous John Dramani Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), for the simple reason that Nana Akufo-Addo has invested unprecedently heavily in the education of our public school pupils and students than all the previous four administrations of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, especially in the critical areas of textbook supply and pedagogy. So, it ought not to come as any surprise that the 2020 Class of Senior High School Students scored twice as high as they had scored under the previous 8-year rule of the Mills-Mahama government. Naturally, a failed Education Minister and the 2020 Vice-Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress is apt to be miffed or offended by the exposure of her relatively abject lack of competent performance as reflected in the dismal WAEC results of our Senior High School Students under the previous regime.

Which is why when Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang snorts that this year’s historically unprecedented performance of our SHS Students at the WASSCE exams can only be fully and genuinely accounted for by widespread cheating of these hardworking students, for the most part, the retired Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana’s foremost tertiary academy for the training of teachers, cannot be taken seriously. Her gratuitous criticism is obviously borne out of envy, jealousy and sheer malice. If I were one of these hardworking and smart students, I would definitely ask Naana Opoku-Agyemang to meet me in court.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 5, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]