By Joab Apollo
On Monday 11th May, 2021, Kenya’s Education Cabinet Secretary, Professor George Magoha announced the results of the 2020 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education, an annual exercise that determines students’ admission to Universities and colleges.
However, the results did not live up to its billing as the same inequalities that have seen schools dominated by middle class children hogged the limelight amidst claims of the re-emergence of exam cheating.
While relatives and friends of students who posted good results took to social media to express their excitement, a debate was simultaneously raging on the quality of education Kenyans are receiving in their schools. With the runaway employment getting out of hand in the East African country, Kenyans blame national exams for deteriorating standards of education in the country.
“What we have now is an ugly situation where everyone pulls all the stops to pass exams, either through cheating or bribing people to sit exams for them,” Kibe Gicheru, a resident of Kayole, Eastern part of Nairobi told this writer, as he and a host of other residents gathered at a restaurant to discuss the results.
“Yet the Ministry of Education still insists it’s up to some good. Nothing has changed. The poor get shortchanged systemically by a people not willing to change.” interrupted his friend who introduced himself as James.
Over the last few years, Kenya’s Education Ministry has moved to thwart rampant exam cheating by introducing stringent rules during examination, which include arrests of those found Hawking exam papers and cancelation of results of schools caught cheating.
However, the measures seemed not to have yielded any fruits as the education Cabinet Secretary himself recently admitted during the examination period that some schools were hiring experts to sit for exams for their students. Cases of crooks selling exam papers also resurfaced.
This has led to Kenyans calling for a ban of national exams.
According to educationist Wandia Njoya of Daystar University, Kenyan exams system “cheats passers that the passers are intelligent and hardworking, and everybody else is not.”
Kericho Senator, Aaron Cheruiyot, opined on Twitter thus: “At what point do we tell the A students that there is a very high likelihood that 10 or 15 years time, they will be working for their classmates who scored C?”
Over the past years, the country has witnessed numerous As in national examination, which continues to be questioned given the country’s dismal performance in research and technology. Many graduates are jobless while some have been branded half-baked by international organizations like the World Bank.
