Obumneme Clement

What I am hearing about WAEC Nigeria is deeply troubling. This year recorded the highest performance in the history of WAEC and they are not happy about it. There is something many Nigerians do not understand about WAEC grading. The score required for A1, B2, B3, C4 etc. may not simply be a permanently fixed number every year. From the information available to me, WAEC applies statistical standardisation/normalisation based partly on the overall performance of candidates. In simple English: If a paper is unusually difficult and candidates generally perform poorly, the threshold required for a particular grade can effectively be lower. If candidates perform extraordinarily well, the threshold can become much higher. So hypothetically, what qualifies as an A in one examination could be around 60, while the statistical threshold in another circumstance could be 80, 90 or even higher. Your final grade therefore may not tell the complete story of your raw score. This year involved candidates sitting examinations under different modes, including computer-based/hybrid arrangements and the traditional paper-based system. And there are serious allegations that questions circulated ahead of time in some paper-based centres. If that happened on a significant scale, it could artificially inflate the overall performance of that population. Then comes the critical question: When WAEC carried out its standardisation, were candidates from fundamentally different examination conditions treated as one population? Because if leaked questions artificially pushed one group’s scores upwards, and those abnormal scores subsequently influenced grade thresholds, an innocent student who genuinely scored very highly could suddenly appear statistically ordinary. Imagine scoring what would ordinarily be excellent marks, only to receive a surprisingly poor grade because you were being compared against an abnormal national distribution. That is the heart of what needs to be investigated. And it wouldn’t affect only computer-based candidates. Honest children who wrote paper-based examinations without cheating could also have been punished by the abnormal performance of people who had access to questions. The innocent students potentially become the victims of the malpractice they never participated in. This is why WAEC cannot simply tell Nigerians that these children failed. Show us the data. What were the raw scores? What were the score distributions? What thresholds produced A1, B2, B3, C4, C5 and C6 in each major subject? Were those thresholds changed after marking? Were computer-based and paper-based candidates standardised separately? How were centres showing statistically abnormal performance treated? And have results changed after candidates requested reviews? Because I am also receiving disturbing reports that some people who aggressively challenged questionable results got their cases reconsidered, while millions of ordinary parents may not even know they can request a review. If that is true, it is unacceptable. A child whose parents have connections cannot have greater access to justice than a child sitting somewhere in a village. And there is another dimension that must not be ignored: I am receiving serious allegations of internal management problems within WAEC Nigeria, including concerns about how staff who question certain decisions are treated. Those allegations also deserve an independent investigation. This is not an attack on WAEC. It is a demand for accountability. The Federal Ministry of Education and National Assembly should urgently invite the leadership of WAEC Nigeria. Because behind every A1, C6 or F9 is not just a statistic. There is a child. There is a family. There is a university admission. There is a scholarship. There is a future. We cannot gamble with the destinies of an entire generation of Nigerian children.

Investing in these children was worth it. They came to Rome and conquered. We will double down on investing in educating our children.

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