New dates for Wajir, Nairobi hearings on exam cheating

Exam cheating

The National Assembly Committee on Education has rescheduled the hearings into allegations of massive cheating in last year’s KCSE  examinations for Nairobi City and Wajir counties.

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The National Assembly Committee on Education has rescheduled the hearings into allegations of massive cheating in last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations for Nairobi City and Wajir counties.

The committee had earlier planned to hold the hearings in Wajir last Friday but had to reschedule because of the start of the holy month of Ramadhan in the pre-dominantly Muslim county. The new date for Wajir is tomorrow while the one for Nairobi will be on Friday.

The sitting in Nairobi will conclude the countrywide public hearings that started on March 20, after which the committee will retreat to write its report and table it before Parliament within two months.

The team has so far toured 10 counties: Nakuru, Nyeri, Uasin Gishu, Embu, Kakamega, Machakos, Nyamira, Mombasa and Kisumu and Wajir.

The committee will, among others, listen to presentations by Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu and Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) CEO David Njeng’ere to explain the conduct of the KCSE examinations last year.

The Nation understands that Mr Machogu and Dr Njeng’ere will be heard next week after the completion of the public hearings. At the conclusion of investigations, the MPs will recommend measures to ensure the integrity of future exams.

So far, many of the stakeholders who have appeared before the committee have alleged that there was cheating in the examinations. Some have blamed the pressure on principals to post good results for the examination irregularities.

“As a committee, we want to bring this exam cheating to an end. We are probing KCSE because there was an uproar across the whole country. Some schools had a mean score of six and shot up all the way to 10, and some had three and got seven. This is where the issue is,” committee chairman Julius Melly said in Mombasa last week.

Mr Machogu and Dr Njeng’ere have maintained that the conduct and marking of the examinations were above board.

Some 1,146 candidates scored grade A compared to 1,138 who attained the grade in 2021.