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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Hon. Namirembe Bitamazire: Time is now to deal with Examination cheats


Honourable Minister of Education and Sports, Geraldine Namirembe Bitamazire, it is true that a number of schools in Uganda are cheating in National Examinations. You can make a difference by coming up with strategies together with the Uganda National Examination’s Board to reduce to acceptable levels the rate of cheating in our examinations.

When some of us move around, the stories are told of how schools are cheating in examinations. My appeal to you is to see this mal – practice is arrested. I have a few proposals to realize the objective:
1) The number of examiners who set papers is a liability. These people are known and rumours have it that some schools invite these people to meet students and chances of leaking set numbers cannot be ruled out;
2) Get Head teachers out of Examination business; at least I have known that these collect papers for their schools. All these procedures help the exam leakage. These people should keep off the schools during examinations until the papers for the day have been taken;
3) The activities of those who set regular papers should be checked. Chances that they receive examination leakages cannot be ruled out;
4) Government should enact a law which leads to nationalization of any school that gets involved in the cheating of examinations;
5) I think Government should get some reward to those who have information regarding the cheating of exams, this is an incentive to arrest the mal – practice.

Hon. Minister you may have to accept the level of cheating in Uganda is beyond acceptable levels. There is a time when at Makerere University when New students were told that if they are sure that they don’t know Mathematics, they shouldn’t mess with registering for Statistics. This means that at these Institutions of Higher Learning, it is common knowledge that schools/students cheat to pass examinations.

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