Exam cheating was widespread even during colonialism

John Mark, who scored 410 marks in KCPE from Kahawa Baptist Academy, is appreciated by staff on December 1, 2016 for his good performance. The names of students selected to join Form One in the 103 national schools will be announced on Monday. PHOTO | FRANCIS NDERITU

What you need to know:

  • Cheating, for instance, has characterised Kenya’s examination system even before I sat my Kape (Kenya African Preliminary Examination) in 1954.
  • A permanent committee of bona fide educational professionals would help the Government to produce an education system dedicated to creating minds and hands nationwide that are socially knowledgeable

An examination – please recall – is only an artificial yardstick by which a society periodically purports to measure how its generations are developing mentally and in terms of manual skill.

But the reason the results of any such measurement are never as accurate as is desirable is that the measuring system itself is permanently faulty.

Cheating, for instance, has characterised Kenya’s examination system even before I sat my Kape (Kenya African Preliminary Examination) in 1954.

It was called “African” because – in the hands of the race-wracked Britons who ran Kenya at that time, our schools were strictly segregated into European, Asian and African children who, accordingly, sat their own race-based kinds of examination.

Even Edward Carey Francis, the relatively liberal Englishman who headed colonial Kenya’s Alliance High School, used to assert that Africans, Asians and Europeans had different mental “wavelengths”.

But among the more objective factors — though the colonial media were deeply silent about it — was the fact that exam cheating was widespread throughout the colony.

The problem has continued to beset Kenya’s system of academic preferment since independence in 1963, and the Ministry of Education is called upon to find an effective answer to it once and for all.

A perennial question related to it is: will the brilliant girls and boys who led the pack in the nation’s schools this year prove their worth in later life?

That question poses itself because every year, after Nairobi’s newspapers have published the names and rosy story of Kenya’s young exam performers, those names immediately sink into anonymity, never to be heard of again.

Every year, after we publish their names in the newspapers, we allow all of our potential Einsteins and Hawkings to vanish completely into what William Shakespeare called “thin air”.

Their anonymity becomes as agonising as that of Kenya’s political mass because we never even occasionally chip in with generous material assistance from the taxpayer’s kitty.

The question stares at you like Medusa’s face: is our curriculum so designed as to help our children to become clear in their minds what subjects to specialise in with maximum usefulness to society after school?

Does the exam system really help the authorities to pinpoint each child’s personal propensity in terms of future profession and social service?

VITAL QUESTIONS

Equally important, does the curriculum adequately invest the relevant resources in each child’s mind and hands?

Are our exams so set as to actually help the authorities to fit each Kenyan child into a relevant and nationally profitable pigeonhole of career?

It is a question which has faced our Ministry of Education and Government ever since the colonial regime.

The only difference is that the nationalist regime that ushered Kenyans into independence was supposed to usher in also a drastically different quality of education and other aspects of children’s upbringing at all levels.

But that never came to pass. One method of tackling the question is wide open to President Uhuru Kenyatta, and he has two very resourceful Kenyans to help him in this task, namely, William Ruto, the indefatigable Vice-President, and Dr Fred Matiang’i , the man who, in the Cabinet, responds to all questions on the nation’s training both of the mind and of the hand.

A permanent committee of bona fide educational professionals would help the Government to produce an education system dedicated to creating minds and hands nationwide that are not only socially knowledgeable but also technically capable of rescuing this country from the technical and intellectual doldrums into which Kenya has been allowed to sink for donkey’s years.

The committee would also spearhead the implementation of its own recommendations, helping to set up appropriate institutions of training and of periodic re-training so that, at all levels of national tuition, our teachers and trainers are permanently clear-headed and sharp-handed in the task of training this nation into moral and techno-intellectual maturity.