Secret report names exam leak suspects

One of the men in police custody over cheating in the current Form Four examinations was a government spy, Saturday Nation can reveal. A police investigation shows the man used to work for the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) as a secret informer on examination irregularities.

Related Stories

• It started in the 90s
• Cheating now tech-savvy

He had done that for a number of years in the past, and was doing it again this year, before he was seized on suspicion that he had turned the job into an extortion racket. According to the investigation that was commissioned by the exam council, the man is referred to as “one of our (Knec) informers”.

At least seven people have been arrested and either released or detained following irregularities in the current Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams, which started on October 21 and end on November 16. Two people have been arraigned before court and charged with exam irregularities.

Last year, the report says, the informer alleged that senior Knec officials were leaking information to one of the Nairobi schools. Upon investigations, 10 candidates at the school were found receiving questions through mobile phone at lunch hour in a residential area in Ngara, Nairobi.

Notably, lunch breaks were abolished starting this year’s exams as the council sought to have all tests done by 2pm to minimise leakage. The report seen by Saturday Nation, and dated November 2, exonerates Knec officials from exam irregularities, saying none was involved in the malpractice.

It traces the leaks to a school in Eastern Province where examination materials were “evidently opened earlier than official time and the materials read out or exposed to candidates in advance”. The report was commissioned following last week’s Saturday Nation exposé that revealed that a cartel was selling exam questions to candidates before the scheduled time.

“This report concentrates on the Saturday Nation of October 31, headline story ‘Cheats Plague KCSE’,” the document said. It said the informer was not a reliable person and could have been scheming examination irregularities to extort money from Knec officials. Further, it says the investigation team had visited a Nairobi school where it interviewed an exam official after it was claimed by fraudsters that she was selling exam papers. Allegedly, the fraudsters were obtaining questions from the exam official and selling at between Sh7,500 and Sh10,000 a set.

However, the investigations cleared the exam official, who is said to come from same the village as a top Knec official. The report concluded that there were several reported cases where candidates started sitting the examinations before or after the official time. “In a case where an examination paper starts before the official time, the opened papers can be exposed to unauthorised persons by unscrupulous supervisors and invigilators,” said the report.

The team noted that there were fraudsters in Nairobi’s Ngara estate selling fake examination papers. Therefore, it insists there were no cases where genuine exam materials were leaked in any part of the country. But on the same breadth, it said questions that were being accessed by the media and candidates were either written from question papers that were opened earlier than the usual time, tacitly admitting there were exam irregularities.

The questions were then read through mobile phones or through short text messages. The findings reinforce the Saturday Nation report, which said some of the 330,000 Form Four candidates were accessing genuine exam questions, hours before the tests. The newspaper established that a cartel of traders had established centres from where it relayed questions to its agents and candidates up to eight hours before the exam papers began.

The questions are sent via mobile phones. Some of the papers, whose questions have been obtained, included geography, biology, fasihi and literature. It turned out that all the handwritten questions that were read to our contacts on the mobile phone were genuine. The only difference in the questions was that they were written in short form, or expressed as statements. Curiously, the joint Knec and police report questions the intentions of newspaper reports on exam leaks, adding journalists who were reporting the stories were not sincere.

Shed light

It called for investigations to establish the source of the questions that were leaked. The council was also asked to put up a paid-up advertisement in the media to shed light on the reports and advise candidates to proceed with their exams without panic.

And true to the recommendation, Knec secretary Paul Wasanga published a media advert on Friday and admitted that some candidates were getting access to papers for the ongoing national tests in advance. Mr Wasanga urged the public to give information on suspected exam cheats.