Secondary schools across Nigeria will lose the freedom to upload and amend students’ Continuous Assessment scores at will from the 2026/2027 session, following the Federal Government’s release of new operational guidelines that tie every candidate’s records to a national identity trail and fixed national deadlines.
Under the guidelines, examination bodies including the West African Examinations Council, WAEC, the National Examinations Council, NECO, and the National Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies, NBAIS, must build secure, interoperable Continuous Assessment portals linked to the Nigeria Education Data Infrastructure, NEDI. Every learner in public and government approved private schools will carry a National Learner Identity Number, NLIN, tied to the National Identification Number, NIN, so that assessment records follow the student rather than the school.
The Minister of Education, Dr Maruf Tunji Alausa, unveiled the wider anti malpractice package alongside the Minister of State for Education, Professor Suwaiba Said Ahmed, in a statement issued by the ministry’s Director of Press and Public Relations, Boriowo Folasade. According to the ministry, the reforms are meant to safeguard the integrity of national examinations and rebuild public confidence in Nigerian certificates. A copy of the operational guidelines confirms that the rules apply nationwide and that the framework will be reviewed after one year of implementation.
The most immediate change for schools is timing. Continuous Assessment records must now be submitted within uniform national windows: first term scores in January, second term in April and third term in August. The portals will open and close on the same dates for every school, ending the practice under which institutions uploaded results whenever it suited them.
The ministry has framed this as a direct strike at score manipulation. By locking submission to fixed dates and to a central database, the guidelines are designed to stop schools from inflating or forging pupils’ scores shortly before final examinations. Continuous Assessment ordinarily contributes a share of a candidate’s overall grade in school based examinations, which makes the figures a soft target for manipulation.
Enforcement rests on penalties. The guidelines list suspension and blacklisting as sanctions for examination malpractice, non compliance with registration directives, misrepresentation of learners and fraudulent Continuous Assessment submissions. A suspended school will have its portal blocked immediately, and its pupils automatically flagged as orphaned. The relevant examination body must notify the host state’s Ministry of Education within two days, after which affected candidates are moved to nearby accredited schools or to approved temporary examination centres so that their records remain intact.
The system also formalises pupil transfers. A school must initiate a transfer request through the portal, and the receiving school must accept or reject it, after which past Continuous Assessment data is carried over automatically. The guidelines make clear that the records belong to the learner, and that no school may unilaterally delete or alter a pupil’s assessment history.
Oversight will run through the ministry’s Basic and Senior Secondary departments, which are to monitor compliance and intervene where necessary.
The renewed push arrives against a backdrop of persistent malpractice that successive reforms have failed to eliminate. When WAEC released the 2026 West African Senior School Certificate Examination results for school candidates, the Head of its Nigeria National Office, Dr Amos Dangut, disclosed that the results of 167,486 candidates had been withheld over alleged malpractice. That figure represented 8.59 per cent of the 1,950,726 candidates who sat the examination.
The scale becomes clearer when placed against earlier years. The 8.59 per cent recorded in 2026 was a fall from 9.7 per cent, or 192,089 results, in 2025, and from 11.92 per cent, or 215,267 results, in 2024. The trend is downward, but the numbers remain heavy, with tens of thousands of candidates affected in each cycle. According to Dangut, the recurring problems include the growing use of mobile phones in examination halls despite the ban, and organised cheating in some schools. He said some supervisors and invigilators found assisting candidates had been arrested and would face disciplinary action through state ministries of education.
A total of 1,959,668 candidates from 24,207 schools registered for the 2026 examination across Nigeria, Benin Republic, Côte d’Ivoire and Equatorial Guinea. It was the second edition of the computer based WASSCE for school candidates, a format Nigeria began rolling out in 2025 to curb impersonation, question leakage and collusion. WAEC, established in 1952, awards certificates that remain central to admission into tertiary institutions and to employment across the region, which is why the credibility of its grades carries weight far beyond the classroom.
The reform also speaks to a wider quality concern. In the 2025 WASSCE, only 754,545 candidates, or 38.32 per cent of the 1,969,313 who sat, secured credits in at least five subjects including English Language and Mathematics, underlining how much rides on accurate, tamper resistant assessment.
The linkage of learner records to the NIN is likely to test the country’s enrolment reality. Many pupils, particularly in rural and low income communities, do not yet hold a National Identification Number, and unstable internet connectivity in parts of the country could complicate the operation of live national portals tied to strict deadlines. The guidelines do not spell out how schools without reliable infrastructure will meet the January, April and August windows.
Parent groups have separately pressed for a stronger voice in education decisions, and analysts have cautioned that previous crackdowns on malpractice have repeatedly promised change without ending it. Whether the new architecture succeeds where earlier measures fell short will depend on enforcement, funding and the readiness of thousands of schools to digitise records they once controlled on paper.
What is confirmed is that the framework is now official, that it applies from the 2026/2027 session, and that it will be assessed after twelve months. What remains to be seen is how smoothly a system built to end score forgery can be delivered across Nigeria’s uneven school landscape.