Abstract
Education as the bedrock of development and one of the fundamental factors determining sustainable economic development has been faced with a lot of challenges; most especially examination malpractice the paper examined the effect of examination malpractice conceptually by reviewing the related literature. Based on the literature reviewed, the paper concluded that there is a gap between the certificates obtained by graduates and their productivity at the labour market due to the various examination malpractice perpetuated by them when they were in school. The paper recommended that Examination malpractice should be discouraged in its entirety. The government, the citizens, the teachers/trainers, the students/trainees, the family and the school, employers and employees, must take this as a critical assignment that must be done.
Keywords: Education, Examination Malpractice, Labour Market, Challenges, Development.
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INTRODUCTION
The overall socio-economic development of any nation depends largely on effective human resource planning, development and utilization. Education is the bedrock of development and one of the fundamental factors determining sustainable economic development. It increases the human capital and production of labour as it leads to high output in the economy. Education equips people with necessary skills and competences and enhances them with innovative capacity of labour. It facilitates the adoption and implementation of foreign technology and helps to reduce knowledge gap between the technological advanced nations and developing nations. It helps the nations to compete in global markets. The knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes to achieve these benefits of education are got from education institutions. This made the educational institutions to be an industry where future leaders, workers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, teachers, thinkers, etc are produced.
The World Bank (1999) explains that a single most important key to development and poverty alleviation is education. It is therefore essential for any nation that is interested in development to improve on the academic performance of its citizens, most especially in tertiary institution. Quality education is essential to the development of any country. Education strengthens citizenship values, fosters sustainable development, it is a powerful tool in eradicating poverty, reduces unemployment, and improves the quality of life of the people (Oseni, Abumere and Ehimi 2010).
These all important roles of educational institutions make it imperative that the institutions should be sacrosanct. Corruption in education is thwarting these noble roles of educational institutions. The effect of corruption on education is too alarming, that instead of education being an agent of purifying the minds of children to become useful members of the society, it is rather diverting the mind of children away from what education is intended for. Because of corruption in education in Nigeria, the graduates of our schools do not measure up to the standards of both internal and external evaluators.
The general emphasis in our society today is on materialism, bribery, corruption, cultism, sexual promiscuity, fraud, violence, certificate racketeering and a host of other social vices. The society does not want to know how an individual achieves success. The important thing is the success.
Nigerian education system has been marked with the weakness of producing unemployable graduates- graduates who need to attend further training before they could be fit for a job. The most disheartening of all these is that education corruption is being perpetrated by all cadre of people involved in education sector, viz: the government, lecturers, parents, teachers, students etc. in fact it is frustrating that all the stakeholders in education are involved in promoting education corruption.
In the light of the above, the objective of this article is to examine the effect of examination misconduct on Nigeria graduate productivity in the labour market crew with a view to determining the relevance of current educational certificate to graduates productivity in Nigeria.
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LITERATURE REVIEW
Tertiary Education
Tertiary education, according to the National Policy on Education (2004), has the following goals to:
