Every year a number of students receive grade 'Y' after engaging in various examination malpractices across the country, forcing them to either repeat the tests or cut short their dreams. Whereas it is justifiable to punish those who engage in cheating, it is leastwise unfair to let go free those who help the students cheat by leaking the papers from the Kenya National Examinations Council warehouses at Mitihani House. The worst mistake ever done by the council, Ministry of Education and the Government in general is to just punish the candidates and fail to initiate a probe to the whole saga so as to block the loopholes.
Candidates engaging in the malpractices incur double costs; buying papers to find a shortcut to success and repeating the tests after a fair share of time. Without the illegal assistance of officers attached to the council, the papers cannot leak. The ministry should therefore not wait for the examination season to warn candidates about cheating. It needs to take the cartels at Mitihani House before it comes for the candidates. In this case, we are talking about malpractices in regards to buying papers before the actual examinations day.
Previous leadership helped tame the cartels to a certain level but that did not prevent them from inventing new ways to do the crime. During the Matiang'i era, the introduction of containers to store the papers as they await redistribution was a game changer. His successors could have however thought of continuing to lock more loopholes because cheating did not stop. If this is not done any time soon, cheating will be here to stay even with the new curriculum.
If the containers attached to subcounty offices proved to work at first, then the same method applied differently can end cheating remarkably. These papers find themselves in the illegal market because they are handled by a large number of people prior to the examination day. The first step should be to reduce the number of people handling the papers from the setting period to the examination day. This will give the Ministry and the council an advantage of tracking down any form of conmanship in time, in case any fraud is reported. The council should then consider setting up printing centers in subcounty or county offices, to which a paper will be sent electronically from Mitihani House few hours before kick off time. The papers will then be printed under tight security from the Critical Installation Protection Unit officers, probably past midnight, be packed before the centre heads arrive in the morning to collect them.
The government is ably in a position and capacity to handle issues like unstable electricity, network and security during this period. The intelligence agencies should also be on high gear to track and trap any form of cheating that may arise.
The cost of reducing cheating instances is higher than that which will be used to come up with regional printing centers. The benefits arising from the current methods are however lower than those that will come from this proposed method. The government incurs a lot to deploy security, ferry the papers from the headquarters to the centers and back to marking centers, as well as pay officers to man the examination yet we are in a technological era that can guarantee us better results at a lower cost.
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