By Taban Henry
The South Sudan National Examination Council has given a stern warning against malpractices to candidates sitting this year’s final senior four examinations.
Education, being a process of teaching and learning is evaluated through examination at the end of the learning period. Examination not only serves as feedback for the trainer to ascertain the level of knowledge acquisition but to also serve as a measure of knowledge retention by the student.
South Sudan senior four students started their exams yesterday with the examinations secretariat warning candidates about malpractices and its consequences.
Speaking to the media shortly after ringing the bell to kickstart examinations, the Secretary General of the National Examination Council, Simon Nyok said that they have deployed security officers across the country to monitor any malpractice of the examinations.
Mr. Nyok said that the national security forces were deployed to crackdown those that may try to misbehave during the examinations period. This year, the bell for starting the national certificate examination was rung at Juba Technical Secondary School.
“In every station, there is one member from the ministry of education, one from the National Examination secretariat and the two National Security officers to monitor examination across the stations and control malpractices,” he said.
“This year, we have devised means to secure conduct of this exam; that is why I said, we have deployed security agents to all police stations to ensure maximum security of exams. So far, we haven’t received any issue of examination malpractice and we are happy that we are going to go through this year,” he said.
The secretary general said that examination malpractice is a vice and an illness that affects the examination system in the world, and it’s mandatory for every examining body to provide security apparatus to mitigate this vice.
The officials noted that, there are 340 secondary schools that have registered, and are sitting examinations this year.
He said that all schools are capable to sit from their centers but if the candidates are less than 40, they can then be resettled to another centre.
Mr. Nyok said that all the 340 schools are clustered in 107 examination centers sitting this year’s exams, with at least 38 examination storage centers.
He stressed that there are people who were arrested and still serving in jail for malpractice during primary leaving examinations. He said that the penalties for examination malpractices are very severe.
“We have the national examination penalties for whoever attempts to jeopardize the integrity of exams; this in-turn jeopardizes the integrity of this country. Though people are to face the full consequences of the law, there are few moving around places where examinations are kept. They will suffer the consequences of breaking the law. They will be sentenced to seven years in jail,” he said.
According to the secretary general, there are 32,167 registered candidates who are sitting for South Sudan Certificate Examinations across the country. He said that all exams were delivered and stationed at examination consignments within the States and the three administrative areas.