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Examination chief unaware of KCSE exam leakage

Details

Published on Monday, 03 March 2008 19:53

The examination authority on Saturday defended itself over claims that alleged leakage in last year’s Form Four examinations led to poor performance by some of the country’s giant schools.

Kenya National Examinations Council secretary Mr Paul Wasanga said markers did not detect any evidence of leakage in the Kenya Certificate for Secondary Education (KCSE) examination whose results were released last Thursday.

Mr Wasanga said he had asked Alliance High School’s deputy principal Mr Francis Ndirangu to explain claims attributed to him in a section of the media that last year’s leakage claims were responsible for the institution’s slight slide in the national ranking. The school was ranked eighth nationally.

Mr Ndirangu reportedly said that best students who failed to access papers that were allegedly leaked performed poorly.

“We are asking him (Ndirangu) to provide evidence of the leakage to prove his claims if at all he was not misquoted,” he said.

Mr Wasanga also dismissed claims by Kenya Association of Parents chairman Mr Musau Ndunda that teachers in national schools were behind examination leaks.

“We question the credibility of setting the questions. We know it is the teachers from national schools who set the same exam questions during mock tests thereby giving their students unfair advantage,” Mr Ndunda said in an interview on Saturday.

About 1,800 candidates were found to have cheated on last year’s national examinations, nearly three times the number of cheats in 2006.

But on Saturday, Mr Wasanga said it had nothing to do with claims of leakage.

“Although the rise in number of irregularities did not mean there was a leakage, it is proof that we went through each paper with a fine tooth comb,” he said.

In the face of many claims last year that some candidates were getting prior access to examination papers, the Knec used a watertight mechanism that helped bring to book the affected candidates, Mr Wasanga said.

The council, he said, scrutinised all scripts of individual candidates, especially those in areas where some were alleged to have obtained exam papers in advance.

He said a good number of the affected candidates were found with mobile phones during the examination period.

The papers were checked to establish any external influence on the work of candidates and where there was any such evidence, the affected scripts were nullified, he said.

Mr Wasanga said performance of schools was traced over the last 10 years to ensure there was consistency either in positive or negative performance.

He dismissed claims that Alliance High School’s performance had dropped and, instead, clarified that it was other schools that improved.

“It is not unusual for a school to record a marginal drop in the rankings. The top 10 national schools keep oscillating within the positions and Alliance is one of them,” he said.

Only Starehe had managed to be ranked between position one and five consistently.

“Some schools improved because of new leadership while others dropped. Yet some improved more than others,” he said.

He cited the example of Light Academy which has been improving over a long time. The school was ranked third among private schools with a mean performance index of 10.55.

He also said that some schools, formerly examination giants, have seen their performance going down over time.

Although there was a drop in rankings in schools like Kamusinga in Western Province, the performance of such other schools was still good, he said.

He also explained why some big schools which performed well could not be ranked because they had some candidates with irregularities.

He named Kisii and Cardinal Otunga High schools as being in this category.

Nonetheless, posted impressive performances with 12 candidates at Kisii High scoring a mean grade of straight As, 73 A-, 81 B+, 64 B and 51 B-. There were 25 candidates with C+, four with C and 2 with C-.

Cardinal Otunga had 12 candidates with mean grade A, 24 (B+), 43 (B), 57 (B-), 29 (C+) and 10 (C). Both schools were not ranked.

Mr Wasanga said some of the ways used to identify cheats include comparing performance of candidates in the actual exams with class tests, Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examination and mock results.

In terms of schools, the council was able to track individual performance of each institution and its overall recorded improvements over a period of time.

Cheating in maths and science subjects was easier to detect since candidates were likely to make similar mistakes in certain questions, where they are assisted.

The council was able to even detect if an individual candidate cheated in a centre, said Mr Wasanga.

Usually, the council asks schools to issue candidate index numbers based on individual ability, with the brightest one getting index number one.

Under this arrangement, the council is likely to establish the expected performance of candidates, although that can vary at times.

Some of the students involved in cheating are often identified through confidential reports filed by supervisors.

Last year, questions were raised over the administration of the examinations following widespread reports that some candidates were gaining prior access to the tests.

In one of the incidents last year, a mathematics paper was obtained by the media hours before it was to be taken by some of the 276,224 candidates who sat the exam.

How the questions were getting their way into the hands of candidates and the media has puzzled even Mr Wasanga, who termed the development as “sabotage”.

It was widely believed that the “leaks” most likely happened in the process of transporting the exam papers.

Mobile phones — which though banned in examination centres were used by some scrupulous candidates and exam officials — helped the process of relaying exam questions once they had been accessed prior to the exam time.

But Mr Wasanga exonerated the council from blame, saying reports of prior access to exam questions were coming long after the materials were delivered to armouries and distribution centres.

He said that the fact that papers were being shown to the media instead of being taken to the council for verification and preventive action smacked of sabotage.

In the period of the exams, nine people were in police custody over the controversial question papers, while 26 students had been arrested and released on bail in Mombasa.

But there were questions as to why police were not catching most of the criminals despite the fact that short text messages used to relay the questions had been presented to them.

The police were on the spot given that they are mainly responsible for the storage and distribution of the examination papers.