HomeOld_PostsAnalysis of ZIMSEC and Cambridge standards: Part Four......e-marking puts ZIMSEC a cut...

Analysis of ZIMSEC and Cambridge standards: Part Four……e-marking puts ZIMSEC a cut above the rest

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ONE aspect that has raised eyebrows with observers is the ease with which it now seems to obtain flying colours.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, 15 points at Advanced Level were not a common occurrence, but has become a chorus these days.
This increase in the number of students passing the local examinations with flying colours has been attributed to the leakages and the way the examinations are set.
Maxwell Rafemoyo of the Education Coalition of Zimbabwe attributed the high Zimbabwe Schools Examinations Council (ZIMSEC) pass rates to the way the examinations are set.
Despite the examination leakages, Dr Lazarus Dokora, Primary and Secondary Education Minister, defended ZIMSEC, saying it was introduced in the education system in consultation with the Cambridge Examination Board and is internationally-recognised.
The latter point has been raised, but my take on this new worry is different from all the above observations.
First, I contest the argument that nowadays 15 points are a bumper harvest because of leakages.
Second, I reject that they are a result of how the examinations are set.
It is not because examiner-marking schemes are relaxed either.
In the first place you need to know that the number of candidates has risen so phenomenally that if you carried a per capita pass rate comparison, you would be shocked to realise that current numbers of 15 pointers are either the same or not fundamentally different.
My second contestation is that if the pass rate and pass quality are higher, it is because of the quality of teachers, the majority of whom are now degreed as well as the availability of learning materials at a cheaper cost than before.
The advent of internet and indeed the proliferation of access to e-resources is a boost that the candidates of the past were not privileged to.
In fact, one major problem Zimbabweans are obsessed with is the tendency to throw away the bath water together with the baby.
So Manichean are our people that when they see anything bad, they are so seized with negative criticism that they hardly recognise the good side, however small.
UNESCO would not have been mistaken to recognise Zimbabwe’s literacy rate as number one in Africa if our education system was that bad.
In our bid to bring sanity to our examination board, let us shame evil by rewarding the good as well.
I think ZIMSEC should be applauded for spearheading e-marking which obviously eliminates the chances of human error and thus improve the integrity of results.
ZIMSEC’s vision of becoming: ‘the centre of excellence within the sub-region and beyond in Quality Assessment in Education’, is in more practical terms, to create an information communication technology (ICT)-driven organisation.
The worldwide trend in the ‘Assessment Community’ is the move towards ICT-driven systems, procedures and processes of assessment.
ZIMSEC, in Africa, is a pioneer in e-marking and is now a case study for examinations boards who are still in the process of setting up their own system.
ZIMSEC pioneered e-marking in 2010.
By June 2011, the first set of national examinations that is Ordinary Level Mathematics and Integrated Science, were marked electronically.
March 2012 saw the introduction of electronic registration for Advanced Level.
The 2012 Ordinary Level June session was used as a pilot test to check the practicality of the system on a large scale.
To date, Ordinary Level and Grade Seven have been integrated into the system with resounding success.
They have not been without challenges though.
The hardware challenges expected have also been largely resolved through sharing in clusters and subsequent acquisitions by those centres that initially did not have their own equipment.
The improved revenues in collected levies have seen virtually all centres acquiring their own hardware.
E-marking is the electronic marking of candidates’ examinations scripts and is the global trend in marking the candidates’ examination scripts.
This method of marking, as mentioned above, reduces the amount of human interface, unlike in belt-marking, therefore reducing the risks of undetected human error and prejudice.
Once the script is scanned into the system where the e-marker software is, the examiner marks and allocates marks according to the set answers that would have been inputted into the system.
This means, if there is an error or query pertaining to the marks, the system is able to pick it up immediately and the chief examiners are able to attend to it.
With e-marking, there is real-time delivery of marks, that is, the marks are automatically sent to the ZIMSEC database.
In essence, the turnaround time for marking is significantly reduced because there is no bulk handling of scripts and there is no filling in of mark sheets after the marking session.
Subjects that are e-marked at the moment are those with constrained components such as, Ordinary Level Mathematics I, Integrated Science, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Commerce, Principles of Accounts and English I.
The software developers are now looking at creating e-marker II which will enable the marking of unconstrained components which are in the essay format and so opening the possibility of marking Advanced level examinations electronically as well.
These innovations and more that are soon to be rolled out are all with the ultimate goal of reducing costs in examination administration, increasing security of examination materials and reducing the reliance on human handling of the examination papers before and after their writing.
And with these developments, our worry about corruption, paper leakages and international integrity will be a thing of the past.
So too will be the ideas of dining with our foes.
In the final analysis, examinations at any level must be designed and executed in a manner that reflects the real capabilities of the learner without any external aid or forged knowledge by fraudulent practice that could distort the exact or appropriate knowledge in the field of learning by the learner being tested.
Examination mal-practice is any illegal act committed by a student single-handed by or in collaboration with others like fellow students, parents, teachers, supervisors, invigilators, printers and anybody or group of people before, during or after examinations in order to obtain undeserved marks or grades.
Once ZIMCHE completes the e-marking process, we should stand tall and proud as Africa’s beacon in assessment integrity.

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