The KCSE (Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education) exams started last week on Monday and have therefore entered their second week as from yesterday.
I have just received information that several schools in a certain region of the country had in their possession one of the Mathematics examination papers that was done recently. One school even “revised” the paper in detail very early in the morning on the very day that students were to sit for the exam. They revised the paper with their Maths teacher!! Can you imagine that? And sure enough, to nobody’s surprise the exact paper they were revising is what came as the exam.
This has led me to make a few more enquiries and I have discovered that these “leakages” are now very “normal” in the country with many students purchasing papers for about Kshs 3,000. In fact many schools last year were not ranked because of massive leakages, however the results of individual students in those school were allowed to stand.
Even spirited efforts by the Kenya national Examination Council this year to clamp down on cheating do not seem to have yielded much because the “cancer” has spread too far and wide to be stemmed easily.
I find this very difficult to absorb because when I went to school, things were not like this and in fact we used to frown on examination cheats. Now it seems that the practice of cheating has become as acceptable as corruption has become in the country.
It is really sad because the culture of corruption seems to have spread into every corner and facet of life in Kenya. Young Kenyans are now clearly using corruption to pass exams.
But the corruption game begins much earlier because many parents use corruption to get their children into good schools and then provide the cash for corruption to pass exams by purchasing exam papers and we have even seen cases recently of corruption to get into the University of Nairobi. This is especially rampant in the parallel program where certificates and all sorts of documents are forged.
It is really scary to realize just how downright rotten the Kenyan society is currently.
P.S. As I was posting this story reports came in of complaints over the widespread "leakage" of the Chemistry paper.
