The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) has been accused of aiding exam malpractices by repeating past Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE).
Purity Ngina of the Zizi Afrique Foundation claimed that over 60 percent of the questions learners answer in the national exams are repeated from previous years.
“In Kenya, it came out that the questions were being repeated, and others were even the same questions and even in the same positions.”
“If it was the same question this year, you will find it two years later, the same question, same position…This is a failure to the people setting the exams, “she said.
Ngina observed that the practice has bolstered exam cheating as students end up cramming answers to repeated questions.
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“Some of the questions are something you can lift from the book, cram, and download; you don’t have a higher question that requires thinking,’’ she said.
Ngina condemned the practice, noting that it has encouraged some schools to hire analysts and researchers to identify questions that have high chances of showing up again in the papers.
“When this happens, it’s possible to think that they (students) were given an exam, but they were just in a brilliant school that exposed them to the real questions, and they replicate the answers,” she said.
The issue of exam cheating has, over the past years, been a headache for the Education Ministry, with Kenyans questioning the Ministry’s ability to mitigate the malpractice.
The 2022 national exams were the latest to raise cheating speculations, especially in the Nyanza region, where schools, notably in Kisii and Nyamira, performed incredibly compared to other places in the country.