The News: In a departure from established practice, Uganda's examinations body has decided that it will no longer release lists of the best performing schools and students.

The spin:

Kampala, February: From next year, the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) will not release students' results of their final primary, secondary and high school examinations. Students, teachers, parents and the general public will just have to guess how well the students performed.

“Our studies have established that the rampant malaria and outbreaks of cholera in the country are the result of unhealthy competition among students and schools,” the official said. “This, obviously, cannot be allowed to continue. Examinations are not about who is the best; rather, they are about examinations officials earning allowances.”

The official said that parents have a “right” not to know how bad some schools are.

“Releasing results, which show which schools performed well and which ones performed badly, causes undue stress among parents. Naturally, any parent would want to take their children to the good schools. But since there are never enough places in the good schools, many parents end up frustrated. We have therefore decided to save them the frustration by not indicating to them which schools are good,” the official explained.

“But obviously, parents who can afford can always buy the details of the exams from UNEB. This would be in line with our efforts to supplement our incomes,” he added.

Students The Analyst talked to welcomed the move. “We won't have to study hard anymore, since our teachers and parents will not be able to tell how well we performed. We don't know if this is healthy, but if UNEB says it is, then it must be,” a pupil who failed all his papers in the last Primary Leaving Examinations said.

UNEB said that not releasing results would also eliminate cheating among schools and students. “They will have nothing to cheat for, which can only be a good thing,” the UNEB official said.

Other government officials are said to be studying the UNEB model to see if it could be applied in other areas. The Electoral Commission (EC), in particular, is tempted to stop releasing results of national elections.

“We think UNEB have hit on something there,” an EC official told The Analyst. “If not releasing results eliminates cheating, then we just might stop declaring election results, since no one cheats as much as politicians in elections. Can you imagine [President] Museveni, [Kizza] Besigye and Miria [Obote] all heading to State House after presidential elections, not knowing who actually won the elections? Cool!”

The only people not happy with UNEB's move are newspaper editors who have complained that not releasing the examinations results will mean that only The Weekly Observer can report about them which, according to them, is “very unhealthy”.

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.

Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4