The long weekend, lasted from 1 to 5 January, has made it impracticable to hold the exams on the dates originally proposed, 6 to 10 January.
“We saw that with the holidays there could be difficulties in printing the exam papers and packaging them so that they would arrive at their destinations on time”, said Gilda Guibunda, the Gaza Provincial Director of Education and Culture, cited in Friday’s issue of the Maputo daily “Noticias”.
The provincial directorate postponed the exams to 13 to 17 January. “The district governments and the school directors have been informed of this alteration, which we think is opportune so that we don’t have any new constraints”, said Guibunda. “The time from now until the exams will not only allow us to prepare ourselves better, but also the pupils, particularly those who were on holiday outside the province. They will have time to return and prepare for the exams”.
Students from 10th and 12th grades must sit the exams again, because when they were held in December, serious academic fraud was detected. Seven teachers are under investigation, and the police are searching for a man who obtained the exam papers, copied them and sold them to pupils. When the fraud was uncovered, he disappeared.
Other frauds detected involved the use of cell phones during the exams. Corrupt teachers sent pupils the right answers by text message.
This was not such a clever idea. When phones were seized from some pupils, and the answers were found in the phone memory, they confessed that the teachers had helped them cheat.
Post published in: Africa News