Correlates of Examination Malpractice and Academic Performance of Secondary School in Obia/Akporand Emohua Local Government Arias of Revers State, Nigeria

Abstract

Examination as an indispensable tools used to evaluate education programme is supposed to be sacred. Unfortunately, this sacredness has been battered by Examination malpractice at various levels of education in Rivers State and Nigeria as a whole. The study correlated examination malpractice and academic performance of student at the Junior School level with particular preference to JSCE and SS1 students’ promotional examination. Two research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at the .05 level of significance. The instrument used for data collections was pro-formas which are archival data obtained from the schools under study. The population of 21,586 students was studied. A simple random sampling technique was used. The sample size of 800 students was selected used Taro Yamane’s formula. The data obtained were analyzed using Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient (r). The major findings of this study were that significance relationship existed between the two variables studie (academic performance in JSCE and SS1 promotional examination of same students for a period of five years. Furthermore, the magnitude of the relationship per year of study has been average, low and/or very low, which signified a very weak relationship in general and a huge gap between the raw scores of individual students in Mathematics as a core subject. Base on the findings, it was concluded that examination malpractice is responsible for the weak relationship and the huge gaps identified that existed between students’ Mathematics score in JSCE and SS1 final results. Recommendations were that government should lay more emphasis on practical knowledge and experience rather than paper qualifications for employment of labour and re-introduction of moral instruction in schools, home and society as a whole.