3 November 2009
Yesterday, over 500,000 pupils began their Primary Leaving Examinations across the country. In due course another 200,000 will start their Uganda Certificate of Education examinations and later some 98,000 will sit for the Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education tests. This is a busy season in the education calendar of the country.
Students, who have been preparing for several years, will finally have to prove how much ready they are. It will also be a defining moment in the lives of many--depending on how the results from this exercise turn out.
And the tension and expectation will spill over to teachers, school managers and parents. In this high-stakes scenario, like we have seen in the past, some people are prone to temptation. The desire to ensure that one passes, a child succeeds or a school emerges a star-performer has prompted some stakeholders to opt to illegal means of influencing results. The most common case has been attempts to access examination results before hand, while in some instances, invigilators help candidates in the course of the examination.
More daring ones try to influence the results at evaluation stage--getting in touch with examiners to "favourably" mark their candidates. It is upon this background that we ask the Uganda National Examinations Board, the Police and other stakeholders to ensure that this process is foul-proof.
We applaud Uneb for going the extra mile by locking up printers, deploying the usual scouts--and in the recent past introducing the conveyer belt marking system. But like we have seen, those bent on cheating are always devising new means--and that is why no one should lie back thinking all the holes have been plugged.
The public should also help in checking out for these crooks. It is in the best interests of this country to produce graduates whose abilities are reflected in their academic papers and not people who have "bought" their way to excellence.
But more importantly, we ask the teachers, parents and school owners to avoid ruining the candidates' future by exposing them to cheating. Getting them into this vice early means grooming a population that in future will have no problem robbing public coffers or stealing patients' drugs. That surely is not how we want our children to turn out as adults, is it?
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