The National Examination Council (NECO) has said 1,283,485 candidates committed examination malpractice during the Senior School Certificate Examination from 2010 to 2016.

The examination body said about 7,410,030 candidates sat for NECO examinations during the same period.

The Registrar/Chief Executive Officer of NECO, Prof. Charles Uwakwe, said this in Abuja, on Thursday, during an event organised by the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related Offences Commission.

Uwakwe, who was represented by Dr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu, said the year 2010 had the highest number of exam malpractice cases with 577,139 recorded while the lowest was in 2014 with a total of 34,744.

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He noted that the NECO’s fight against examination malpractice has resulted in the decrease of such act.

He identified forms of exam malpractice to include bringing in prohibited materials into the examination hall, ‘dubbing’, which takes the form of tattoos, missiles, micro chips; use of contractors or mercenaries, walkie-talkie, mobile phones and writing on the chalkboard by supervisors amongst others.

The NECO boss added, “Recently, we realised that some of these supervisors allow phones and they are used in taking pictures of question papers and then the candidates send the pictures straight to websites and before you say ‘Jack Robson’, the website would have solved the questions and then they return the answers to them.”

He stated, “All that is needed to write the NECO exam is N11,350 but many schools charge between N30,000 and N50,000. What do you do with the rest of the money? They call it administrative fee and all kinds of things and yet we get N11,350.

“You go to schools during an examination and the principal will insist that those who haven’t paid school fees will not write exams unless they pay and we insist that we have no contractual agreement with schools.”

Azeez