Examination malpractice has become a social plague in Nigeria educational system. The mad rush for acquisition and over dependence on paper qualification without recourse to corresponding knowledge in skills and competence by an average Nigerians has aggravated students in different tiers of Nigeria educational system to device various means to compromise examination; which serves as a yardstick for teachers to ascertain the level of knowledge acquisition and retention by the students. This paper examined the advert of smart phones and examination malpractice in Nigeria, especially in tertiary institutions. Relevant journals and conference papers were consulted and are sources of secondary data used in the paper. It is discovered that the advert of smart phones and its availability to most tertiary institution students has led to the gaining of ground of electronic device cheating as a form of examination malpractice in Nigerian tertiary Institutions nowadays. The study also sees compromised security agents and poor invigilation on the part of lecturers who are mostly used as invigilators in semester examination in tertiary institutions as factor responsible for prevalence of electronic device cheating. This paper suggested that ban on the use of mobile smart phones in examination halls be enforced to curb the new wave of electronic cheating, full implementation of examination malpractice Act 33 of 1999 and a general change in societal crazy rush for acquisition and over dependence on academic paper certificate, as measures to curb examination malpractice in Tertiary institutions.
Keywords: : examination malpractice, Smart Phones, Tertiary Institutions, electronic device cheating.
