The Zimbabwean has established an unprecedented
decline of standards at the Zimbabwe Examination
Council (ZIMSEC) with farcical problems such as answer
sheets for one of the subjects having gone missing.
Senior officials at ZIMSEC told The Zimbabwean that
the examination authority is still weighing the
options of not giving grades for Shona at all or
creating them from the blues after a mysterious
disappearance of answer sheets for Paper 1 of the
subject.
“It is still unknown what happened to the answer
sheets and the last meeting had not resolved what
exactly to do over the matter,” a senior official
said. “That is in addition to four other subjects,
which suffered a crisis of markers and are yet to be
completed, including science, maths and physics.
Investigations by The Zimbabwean revealed that most
teachers shunned ZIMSEC and refused to mark last
year’s examinations due to the poor payments offered.
The examination body was paying Z$1 million per answer
sheet marked, and that covered allowances.
“That money is a joke and nobody could find sense in
participating,” a teacher based in Harare said. “It
was not even enough to cover transport and
accommodation for those who were traveling.”
O-Level results normally come out at the end of
January of first week of February but Education
minister Aenias Chigwedere concedes they are likely to
be delayed. “There were some problems with the marking
system that might cause some delays but we hope things
will go according to plans,” he said.
Standards have continuously plummeted since the
take-over of running of examinations by ZIMSEC a
couple of years ago, to bring an end to a legacy of
quality education products that had become an envy
across the whole world when candidates still sat for
the Cambridge exams. Leakages of examination papers
have become a permanent feature in the local running
of examinations.
Â