Machogu suspends nine exam centre managers over malpractices

Education CS Ezekiel Machogu. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu has suspended nine exam centre managers for engaging in examination malpractices.

However, the CS said that the KCSE exams were going well, with 903,260 candidates sitting for the papers.

The suspended centre managers were manning exam centres affected by malpractices recorded by the Education Ministry.

The malpractices include smuggling unauthorized material into the exam rooms, going with and using phones at the exam centres, impersonation and collusion between candidates and exam invigilators.

Addressing the media during a tour of Kolanya Girls National School, in Teso North, Busia county on Friday to oversee the sealing of the Chemistry practical paper, Machogu said 46 candidates have so far been implicated in exam malpractice and most of them were found with foreign material in the exam rooms.

“From the time we started KCSE, we managed to have a multi-agency approach where apart from my Ministry of Education, we also had the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of ICT, and due to that particular approach and the kind of mechanism and measures that we were able to put in place we were able to be very effective in preventing and curbing cheating and malpractices,” he said.

The CS revealed that cases of collusion were three, while impersonations were two.

“For the centre managers who were implicated, we have asked them to step aside. We have also 46 candidates who were implicated," he said.

“I want to assure the country that all has gone very well because we have not had cases like before because of the new rule that we came up with of increasing the number of containers and distribution centres where centre managers who were coming for the papers in the morning and also went for the same in the afternoon were avoiding cases of early exposure which we used to experience before,” he added.