The unprecedented leakage of our secondary school examination
papers is quite worrying and perhaps might be replicated next week when
the national primary school examinations are administered.
Several
suspects have been arrested across the value chain that handles the
national examinations, but this has not really addressed the root cause
of this behaviour.
Many blame the proliferation of
social media tools such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and others that
have been used as the conduit for sharing the leakages. My blame would,
however, lie elsewhere.
If, as a nation, we have for a
long time tolerated and glorified theft in every sphere of our
leadership, why should we be shocked that the education sector is
finally getting infected by similar behaviour?
LEAGUE OF THE FAKE
If
you need a fake or corrupt police commissioner, a fake gynaecologist, a
fake pastor, a fake professor, a fake musician, a fake politician, you
name it, Kenyans can get you one instantly without too much effort or
research.
So why should we be surprised that our
children want to join the league of the fake and corrupt by cutting
corners in their search for educational success?
Indeed,
in some twisted form of wisdom, some reports indicate that a few
parents are actually involved in procuring some of the leaked exams on
behalf of their kids
Clearly, the old slogan of "work
hard to secure a good job in the future" has now been replaced by "cheat
smart to secure instant success". This seems to be the slogan that
previously was silently practiced, but is currently proclaimed loudly
and exercised without apologies across our social fabric.
We
as a nation have collectively failed to pass on the values that we
inherited from our forefathers and we are now paying dearly for it. Hard
work, honesty and diligence, among other virtues, are currently
considered a weakness, while shortcuts, deceit and laziness are widely
celebrated and instantly rewarded.
TECHNOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS
Technology
on its own cannot, of course, cure this type of incapacitating disease.
It can, however, begin to mitigate or at least slow down the grand
march towards self-destruction that we and our next generation seem to
have deliberately chosen.
One of the technological
interventions is practiced by many of the professional bodies that
currently offer their exams through the online delivery mode. The UK
accounting exam, ACCA, the global technology exams such as by CISCO and Microsoft are just but a few examples.
In
the online examination delivery mode, a large data bank of questions is
built from which the computer randomly selects a range of questions
that would be subjected to the candidate.
The actual
questions the candidate will respond to are actually not known in
advance, but are instantaneously generated when the candidate logs into
the examination portal. Even the setters do not know which of their
questions will actually be administered.
Furthermore,
if two candidates are seated next to each other they will be answering a
different set of randomly generated questions – as longs as those
questions have the same pedagogical objectives and weighting.
HARD WORK, HONESTY, DILIGENCE
Of
course, this approach will not work for millions of our candidates who
have no access to computing devices, let alone Internet services.
However, the concept that we could create a database of many questions
with a view to randomly selecting a set of them to be administered by a
sub-county, county or country would go a long way in curbing cheating
incidences.
This is particularly true if those
randomized sets of questions are determined and generated on that very
morning of the examination day. Copies can then be electronically
circulated to the examinations centres, 10 to 15 minutes before the exam
for printing. This assumes that by then the candidates are already
seated in the exam room without their mobile phones or WhatsApp-related
tools.
This may be some form of first-aid to address
the crippling disease that straddles the examination sector. However,
the long-term solution is to stress the importance of hard work, honesty
and diligence instead of instant gratification that is preferred by our
"instant-coffee" generation.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya's Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter: @jwalu Email: jwalubengo@mmu.a
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