A girl’s tale of withheld PLE results

Masajja Modern Primary School where Shadia Namutebi sat her Primary Leaving Examinations. PHOTO BY RACHEL MABALA.

What you need to know:

In 2013, Uneb withheld PLE results for Masajja Modern Primary School where Shadia Namutebi was a candidate. She redid the exams last year at the school and results were released.

KAMPALA

It is 10am on a Friday and Shadia Namutebi is at Masajja Modern Primary School, where she sat her Primary Leaving Examinations last year.

The 14-year-old is eager to know what she scored, after the Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) released the exams the previous day, January 15. When the school’s deputy head teacher, Mr Levy Emiat, hands Namutebi her results, she erupts into joy. Her happiness can only be understood by her parents and teachers, who endured the grim mood last year.

Masajja Modern Primary School was one of the schools whose exams were held by the exam body in 2013 for reasons the school’s management says it has not yet understood. “It gave us a bad image and I can’t bear remembering the agony we had to endure to calm the angry parents and contending with Uneb’s decision to hold our pupils’ results,” Mr Emiat says.

The reason Uneb gave was “collusion”, something the school says, is too abstract for them to understand. “We tried to engage Uneb on the matter. Their officials simply invited all the pupils from our centre and told them their results would never be released and that they should try other alternatives,” Mr Emiat narrates.

These other alternatives included sitting for the exams the next year. But there was still the issue of angry parents to deal with.

Ms Kamiat Alupot, whose child was affected, says the school agreed to let the pupils study at the school for free, with parents providing only the scholastic requirements. Only five pupils returned to rewrite their exams at the school.

Although Namutebi and the 46 other candidates at the school had a fair performance with 11 pupils in Division One, 26 pupils in Division Two, and the rest in Division Three, Emiat says the blemish of withheld results will always hang over the school’s head.

When Uneb released the 2014 PLE results, it indicated that out of the 604,971 registered candidates, 1,344 candidates’ results were withheld due to suspected involvement in various forms of malpractice.
Uneb identifies some of the common forms of malpractice to include collusion, impersonation and substitution.

Uneb’s spokesperson Amis Kaheru says most of the exam malpractices investigated arose out of the schools’ negligence to take charge of their responsibilities during the examination period.

The official, who also sits on the security examinations’ committee, says in many cases, people blame Uneb for failing to prevent the malpractices, an argument he rubbishes.

“You can’t commit a crime because police has failed to prevent you from committing it,” Mr Kaheru observes. Adding: “As Uneb, we have a one-on-one with the affected students, and in many cases they acknowledge having had one or two cases of the malpractice they are accused of.”

Namutebi supports his claims when she narrates what happened in 2013. She says there were no invigilators at the school save for one supervisor. “We were seated in three classrooms so the supervisor would check on one and go to the next after some time. When the supervisor would go to the next room, students in another room would take advantage of his absence. We consulted each other for answers because we all wanted to pass,” she says.

Mr Kaheru warns: “Going forward, the head teachers must be key in supervising these exams because we will reach a point where we shall be forced to simply cancel the affected schools’ centre numbers,” This year, the number of malpractices decreased from 1,424 in 2013 to 1,344, a difference of 80 candidates.