By Promise Dube
The Zimbabwe School Examination Council (ZIMSEC) has claimed that it will enhance security measures for the end-of-year examinations following several leakages and cheating scandals that rocked previous examinations.
Leaked examination papers caused by negligent officials in some cases have over the years increased threatening the credibility of the examination process and the education system as a whole.
Fears of the same have once again risen but ZIMSEC claims it will introduce new strategies to curb exam leakage cheating ahead of this year’s examinations.
“ZIMSEC has come up with some measures to increase the security of examination material as well as during the writing of examinations,” said ZIMSEC public relations manager Nicky Dlamini in an interview with CITE.
Dlamini said the measures were meant to safeguard the integrity of ZIMSEC and the examination process as a whole.
“These methods include the provision of the examination material, which were otherwise allowed to be provided for by the examination centre for schools as well as increased security at our cluster centers where we do look after our question papers,” she said.
However, the ZIMSEC spokesperson said the organisation will not reveal the measures in detail publicly.
“Other security measures as you have requested in detail, we are not able to do so because you do know that in a security situation when an organisation where there is security you cannot alert the public of what we are doing because that would mean we have not actually done anything,” she said.
“It’s like telling a thief where exactly your cameras are in your house. So that is as much as I am able to tell you at the moment.”
However, sources told CITE that some of the measures will include the delivery of examination material on the same day of writing.
“Question papers may be delivered on the day so that no one will have access to it beforehand. These question papers will also have names of the candidates already filled on them, perhaps to prevent others having more papers than necessary,” sources said.
The sources claimed that ZIMSEC will deploy vehicles all over, where each cluster will have a vehicle to collect the papers immediately after writing.
