Knec should find better ways to secure exams than militarising them

Some of us belong to an era when exams were done without too much drama.

You went to primary school knowing that one day you will sit a national exam then proceed to high school.

One never expected to copy or get leakage through social media or other high-tech means. The same standard of honesty applied in high school, where students actually studied and sat exams expecting to reap only what they had sowed.

Whether you passed with flying colours, scraped through, or got an average score, it really did not matter as long as it was a reflection of your effort.

School was, after all, not an examination drilling camp. It was a place where you learnt and shared life-long values of hard work, honesty, respect for others, and forged lasting contacts as well as generally learning how to behave ethically within society.

Passing exams would then be as a result of having learnt and practised these values, rather than as a result of how successful one was in illegally gaining access to examination papers.

INSTANT GENERATION

Fast-forward to today – the ''instant'' generation. Courtesy of instant coffee, instant taxi and instant messaging, they would naturally want to expect instant success without hard work.

Indeed we have a problem. But it is not clear if the current solution of weaponising the examination process resolves it or aggravates it further.

Raw projection of police power in an effort to protect exams subconsciously communicates to the students that they can only do the right thing through external pressure, rather than through conscience.

In an effort to nail the minority thieves, we are indirectly telling the innocent majority that doing the right thing can only happen under the threat of a gun or imprisonment.

BETTER WAY

There must be better ways of protecting the exams without necessarily exhibiting such raw power and sending the wrong signals.

With so much technology around, one wonders why examination papers are still being transported and escorted across the country under heavy security, as if they are a pack of high-value drugs or the Ebola virus.

Whereas the examination papers could be emailed directly to schools to avoid this transportation overhead, email introduces the risk of soft copies falling into the wrong hands.

A more robust approach would be to redesign the whole examination process such that the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) would have a databank of standardised examination questions that can be randomly pooled to generate a test paper on demand.

Typically, this would require that a few minutes to each exam paper, the examination officials from the ministry, Knec and the headmaster digitally sign into the question bank and generate a test paper that is unique to that school and for that moment.

Sharing such a paper through social media with another school or candidate would therefore not be useful since the neighbouring school will be having a different exam paper, produced through the same random process.

The school can then run copies for the number of candidates present and have the exam administered in a less militarised or less weaponised environment.

Additionally, the system would be more secure because even officials from Knec would not be in a position to know which set of questions would be administered to which group of schools, and so they would not be in a position to ''assist'' anyone.

With such a system, those who wish to steal exams would be dealt with appropriately, without exposing the innocent candidates to the high-octane drama that has recently been normalised within our examination process.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @Jwalu