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Most students will start writing O and A-Level examinations next week. – (youthvillage.co.zw)

Stanely Mushava Features Correspondent
Although Zimsec is not a tabloid, it can be relied on to come up with a bizarre story, mostly revolving around exam leaks, at least once a year. Its porous administration punishes candidates with multiple sittings almost every year and jeopardises the country’s reputation as the regional powerhouse in basic education.

Ironically, the parastatal tasked with performance measurement has itself been a consistent underperformer, unable to devise a foolproof way around the problem. This year, no papers have leaked so far but thieving vandals had a new low in mind: breaking into a school’s storeroom, stealing Grade 7 Zimsec answer sheets and later burning them.

Subsequent explanations point to thieves stumbling on the Zimsec papers upon breaking in to steal $1 600 that had been collected for a school trip. Whether answer sheets were torched out of spite or destruction of paper trail, security issues are proving to be a persistent headache, forever setting students’ teeth on the edge for grapes eaten by few culprits.

And the costs run deeper. In 2014, a nationwide resit of Mathematics and English, two papers apiece, cost Government more than $1 million, an intolerable loss in times like these. Other malpractices include Zimsec falling short of its quality assurance mandate, mismatching multiple choice answers or taking slang too literal in language exams to the dismay of local communities.

The gridlock system where exam papers which will only be opened by remote control from Zimsec a few minutes before candidates write failed to take off as anticipated in 2015. Grade 7 exams for 2016 have already been seated without the technology which meant to forestall exam paper leaks. We could not obtain comment from Zimsec at the time of going to press.

With high school examinations coming up shortly, the education segment of Herald Review interviewed Primary and Secondary Education Minister Dr Lazarus Dokora to find out how the security compromises would be addressed and what quality assurance mechanisms are coming into the picture. Dr Dokora said his ministry had approved migration of fee payments to plastic money on the understanding that cash may be an appetising factor in security breaches.

“The recent incident where papers were burnt must alert schools against mixing money with exam scripts. Sadly, these things are more likely in rural schools which have not caught up with the new payment system because ordinarily parents would have paid at swipe machines,” he said.

Banks are aggressively marketing swipe machines which are operational across banks. However, for the security concern to be safely out of the way, parents will have to catch up. In the interest of enhanced security and quality assurance, the ministry has recommended Zimsec to undergo ISO certification.

According to the International Standards Organisation (ISO), certification can be useful for enhancing credibility “by demonstrating that your product or service meets the expectations of your customers” and is, for some industries, a “contractual requirement”.

“What we have said to Zimsec going forward is that they must be setting the stage for ISO certification. Zimsec will have to undergo a programme of standards-setting and benchmarking,” said Dr Dokora.

“Those standards should be repeatable year in year out. They have to look at security arrangements for which they have to be the only certifying agency,” Dr Dokora said.

Under the proposed arrangement, schools will have to first satisfy Zimsec that they have made the necessary investment before being permitted to seat examinations.

Minister Dokora explained that Zimsec would assess requirements such as the strongroom for storing papers and its security features as well the training of invigilators. However, Zimsec had made considerable distance in with electronic marking.

“You take images of the answer sheets, load them on a belt and position markers who look at a machine making the points arising out of the image.

“You make the first mistake, it holds you and you need your supervisor to allow you to proceed; second mistake, same thing; third, you are out of your job.

We say: No, this is not a reliable marker!

“These are the kind of mechanisms we are looking at because they are repeatable. You can take any marker and place them there. And it safeguards the reliability of the marking,” Minister Dokora said. The examinations body introduced e-marking in 2010 and operationalised it in June 2011, with O- Level Mathematics and Integrated Science becoming the first subjects to be marked electronically.

The following year, A-Level students were registered electronically in March and O-Level June examinations were used to pilot-test broader applicability.

Zimsec notes that hardware challenges initially slowed the transition but have been resolved by sharing and subsequent acquisition across clusters.

“This method of marking, as mentioned above, reduces the amount of human interface, unlike in belt marking, therefore reducing the risks of undetected human error and prejudice,” Zimsec notes in a recent web entry.

“Once the script is scanned into the system where the e-marker software is, the examiner marks and allocates marks according to the set answers that would have been input into the system.

“With e-marking, there is real-time delivery of marks, that is, the marks are automatically sent to the Zimsec database. In essence, the turnaround time for marking is significantly reduced because there is no bulk handling of scripts and there is no filling in of mark sheets after the marking session,” notes the examinations body.

Currently O-Level Mathematics, Integrated Science, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Commerce, Principles of Accounts and English I are e-marked. Zimsec software geeks are looking to perfect a second e-marker to enable the long-form answer sheets such as essays, thereby opening the possibility of scaling up e-marking to A-Level.

The gridlock system, for which we could not obtain timely clarification from Zimsec, meant to introduce electronic seals and remote controlled smart keys to keep unscrupulous school heads’ hands off exam papers before authorised time. Gridlock technology was first introduced by a South African firm in 2014 and has since been franchised by a local company.

Zimsec has lined up ambitious plans including seating Zimbabweans in South Africa for exams through a correspondence school run by the ministry. The body will be progressively examining new learning areas introduced by the ministry under the new curriculum framework.