The Zimbabwe School Examinations Council Amendment Bill
The Zimbabwe School Examinations Council [Zimsec] is a statutory body which organises examinations for learners at primary and secondary schools. It is responsible for protecting the integrity of Zimbabwe’s public examinations, i.e. maintaining standards and seeing that the results are not discredited through leaking of exam papers and other forms of cheating. It is not altogether successful in carrying out this responsibility, as regular press reports of leaking suggest.
The Government’s latest attempt to stop the leaks is set out in the Zimbabwe School Examinations Council Amendment Bill, which was published in the Gazette on the 6th June and is currently awaiting its Second Reading in the National Assembly. The Bill can be accessed on the Veritas website [link].
Contents of the Bill
The Bill is a short one, and the amendments which it will make to the Zimbabwe School Examinations Council Act [which we shall call “the Act” in this bulletin] are not very extensive or far-reaching. They are also not very well thought out, as we shall make clear in this bulletin.
The main amendments the Bill will make are as follows:
Change of title of Director
The officer who manages Zimsec’s day-to-day affairs is currently called the Director, and the Bill proposes to change that title to “Chief Executive Officer”. Unfortunately the Bill tries to do this by removing the definition of “Director” from the Act and inserting a new one of “Chief Executive Officer”, while leaving references to “Director” elsewhere in the Act unchanged. This means that anyone who reads the amended Act and sees a reference to “Director” will search in vain to find out who he or she is.
Power to de-register examination centres
Section 4 of the Act gives Zimsec power to approve and register examination centres, i.e. schools and other institutions where Zimsec’s examinations are held. The Bill will amend section 4 to give Zimsec power to monitor these centres and de-register them “subject to … regulations”.
Strictly speaking the amendment is unnecessary because Zimsec’s power to approve and register centres includes by implication a power to cancel their registration if they fail to meet the conditions under which they were registered. If Zimsec is to be given an express power of deregistration, however, the reasons for de-registering centres should be set out in the Act. More importantly, a centre should be told why Zimsec proposes to deregister it and given an opportunity to defend itself. In other words, there must be a provision in the Act obliging Zimsec to follow the minimum standards of fairness laid down in section 68 of the Constitution and in the Administrative Justice Act.
Change of composition of Board
Zimsec’s governing body is the Examinations Board, all of whose members [apart from the Director] are appointed by the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education. The Bill proposes to change the Board’s composition to:
- three representatives of State universities and three representatives of “private universities”
- the Chief Executive Officer
- two representatives of organised commerce and industry
- a lawyer, and
- five other members, qualified in auditing, human resources, finance, information technology and risk management.
All these members will be appointed by the Minister.
The new Board will be half the size of the present one (which at over 30 members is too large) and its members will have a refreshingly wide range of expertise. To that extent the amendment proposed by the Bill will improve Zimsec’s efficiency. Nonetheless there are concerns:
- The amendment does not specify that any members of the Board should have experience or expertise in primary or secondary school education.
- The Act currently provides for the Board to have a chairperson and vice-chairperson, both appointed by the Minister [see sections 6(1)(a) and 10]. The amendment will remove reference to the chairperson but will leave the provision for the vice-chairperson intact. So the Board will not have a chairperson, unless the members elect one themselves, but it will have an appointed vice-chairperson.
- The Bill contains no transitional provision, so it is not clear what will happen to the members of the current Board. Will they go out of office when the Bill comes into force? If not, how will the new Board come into being?
Offences and penalties
Clauses 8 and 9 of the Bill set out new criminal offences and penalties, some of which have not been well thought out.
- It will be an offence for a person “to make representation that he or she or that someone is in possession of an examination material [i.e. an exam paper]”. So if a teacher asks a colleague whether exam papers have been delivered to their school and the colleague answers “Yes, the head has got them,” the colleague will be guilty of an offence and liable to two years in prison.
- It will also be an offence for a person to “dispose of” a forged “O” or “A” Level certificate. So an employer who, on being presented with a forged certificate by a prospective employee, tears it up and throws it away will be guilty of an offence and liable in this case to be imprisoned for up to five years.
- If more than half the candidates taking an exam at an examination centre are found to “have acted contrary to the provisions of the Act” – meaning, presumably, that they are found to have cheated – Zimsec will be obliged to suspend the registration of the centre and organise fresh exams for the “affected students” at the centre’s expense. Since more than half of the “affected students” have been cheating, it seems odd to give them a second chance at the exam. It may also be hard for Zimsec to recover the cost of the exam from the centre, if it is an impoverished rural school.
Omissions from the Bill
There are some omissions from the Bill:
- The Bill does not mention the Public Entities Corporate Governance Act, which regulates bodies such as Zimsec. For example, according to section 11 of that Act, members of public entities such as the Examinations Board are not allowed to serve for more than two terms of four years. There is no such provision in the Bill. Also, it would be helpful if the Bill included the requirement, set out in the Constitution and the Public Entities Corporate Governance Act, that there must be equal numbers of men and women on the Board and that all the country’s regions should be fairly represented.
- Continuous assessment learning activities are supposed to form part of our education system, yet the Bill does not try to integrate them into the examinations conducted by Zimsec.
- The Bill tries to tackle the problem of exam cheating and leaking by creating new criminal offences and increasing the penalties for existing offences. It does not try to tighten up the systems and procedures in order to make cheating and leaking more difficult. In other words, it sets out to punish improper conduct that has already happened rather than try to prevent the conduct from happening.
Conclusion
As we have made clear, the Bill has a surprisingly large number of defects for such a short piece of legislation. It will make no substantial changes to the Act, apart from streamlining the Examinations Board, and the changes it does make it makes badly. If the Bill were an exam paper, we would mark it “F” for fail.