Eduwatch Reports Busts Black Market Of Leaked WASCCE Exam Papers

Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch), a civil society organization with a focus on education has launched a report that exposes the existence of a black market for leaking West African Certificate Examination questions to cheating students and parents.

These leakages are done at fees ranging from Ghc30 to Ghc150 per leaked paper.

Eduwatch made the revelation at the launch of “Eduwatch 2021 WASSCE Ghana Monitoring Report.”

It revealed the WASSCE leaked questions black market is a very active and lucrative one with a cross-section of participants including students, teachers and school owners.

These reprobates use social media, and a platform called Telegraph to leak the questions to students willing to pay after they have received payments through mobile money.

Eduwatch’s investigation confirmed that eleven papers were leaked in the 2020 WASSCE including, Food and Nutrition, Further Mathematics 2, English Language 2, Physics(which was subsequently rescheduled,), Biology 3, Core Mathematics 1and 2, Economics 2, Chemistry 1, integrated Science, Integrated Science 2.

According to the group, the data were collected from 8th August to 8th October 2021.

As part of the investigation, Eduwatch says it subscribed to over 20 leakage platforms with a combined subscribership of over 200,000 members. 

On these platforms, questions are sold for between GHC30 and GHC150 per paper.

The manner of the transaction was that interested students made payments via mobile money after which they get enrolled on paid platforms where questions were delivered up to ten hours before a paper is written. Eduwatch went through those processes as part of the investigation.

According to the group, Elective mathematics was the highest-priced question.

The Telegram platform was used because of its effective camouflage as it operates without a sim card or a static address making it impossible to track owners.

According to it, the cheating students who bought questions were widespread. 

A sample frame of one hundred schools from which Eduwatch received information on alleged examination malpractices during the 2020 WASSCE was drawn, out of which 50 schools that were examination centres were purposely selected based on their ability to undertake a successful entry and monitoring.

The organization included invigilators, teachers, media personnel, security, and officials as undercover data collectors.