What 'missing marks' crisis says about higher education

University of Nairobi (Photo: Courtesy)

It is fairly accurate to suggest that “missing marks” in public universities constitute something bordering on a national disaster. For any random Kenyan selected, one is either affected directly, or knows a Kenyan who is enduring or has survived, and probably recovering from the trauma of a “missing mark”.

The impact of missing marks in our universities is not too different from other calamities recently suffered such as the unga crisis, security challenges or the recent cholera outbreak that has, for the first time since the end of white minority rule in Kenya, defied social status and power.

I felt compelled to write about missing marks after listening to distressing accounts of students, families, academics and even communities in the context of this crisis.

A neighbour’s son had to change a degree programme in the same university following a two-year distressing search for marks that could not be traced by all the relevant organs of the university. The transfer to a new programme seemed the most logical recourse after the search for the missing grades sapped not just the energies of everyone in the family, but also its resources.

A senior university administrator amused us with an incident in which a village chief sought his intervention, following multiple complaints from families in his location that a public university had simply “lost” marks for their children.

The students had missed graduation for the second time. Recently, a lecturer was on the receiving end of a verbal scolding at a social gathering after enthusiastically introducing himself as a university don. He was promptly reminded that his employers had since lost moral claims to the university name and should henceforth be referred to as as “the University of Missing Marks”.

Earlier in the year, when Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i bludgeoned the Commission for University Education (CUE) into conducting an audit of higher education institutions, top on the agenda was to unearth the mystery of missing marks. That a Cabinet Secretary was now on a hunt for lost marks in our campuses was telling. I am reliably informed that of the many complaints lodged at the Ministry of Education and the Ombudsman against universities, disturbing accounts of missing marks dominate other complaints.

An examination mark or grade is as sacrosanct in the academe as justice is in the judiciary. The honour of a university is reducible to a how a single grade is individually and institutionally processed. A grade is the currency of academic mobility and one of only a few indicators of merit and accomplishment.

Grades and marks are also the only non-demonstrable material representation of intangible knowledge and skills acquired in the course of training. In the university, a singular grade is secured by a structure of boards, external examiners and senates to preserve its hallowed status. To tinker with a grade, let alone lose one, is near sacrilege.

However, while the public has been quick to point an accusing finger at academics over missing marks, what has been lost in the entire debate is that missing marks are merely symptomatic of a bigger problem, both structural and moral. The moral contradictions of missing marks emerge out of the larger aspects of a dysfunctional structure. Thus, missing marks are only symptoms and a proper diagnosis must go beyond them.

First, missing marks are the evidence of a poverty of academic leadership for more than 10 years. From the highest offices in the Education Ministry to academic leadership in departments, the rains started beating us when we lost sight of the true meaning of higher education and its role in society and in national development. Missing marks and lost grades are the outworking of unplanned university expansions, and the exaltation of a mercantile logic into higher education.

Physical and human resources

The massification of higher learning came with a hefty price. While universities sought as many numbers of students as possible from a populace that is convinced that a university degree is the only gateway to improved social and economic status, this horizontal, dispersed expansion was not followed through with a proportional, vertical expansion of physical and human resources. More damning, the previous systems of organising and processing examinations established in the 1970s and 1980s for only hundreds of students were not equipped to process the details of thousands of students today.

At a political level, the populist massification of higher learning was articulated as opening spaces for other deserving Kenyans. These lofty ideals had unintended consequences. Universities slowly lost control of their own academic calendars. More troubling, the pressure to keep up a continuous calendar sacrificed a revered academic culture; that students must of necessity publish results of the previous academic year before proceeding to the next. This is not only sensible, but is paramount in a system anchored on progressive learning.

As I write, few universities have functional almanacs beyond an academic year. As such, with crucial decisions on term dates in disarray, and academic timelines made whimsically, academics and students often struggle to manage their own and institutional timelines of managing exams.

The compounded problem thus affects an examination process that should ideally be predictable and simple. Only a structured, simple and predictable examination process can rid our universities of missing marks. This process must be guided by strict guidelines, timelines and clear procedures on the obligations of students and academics within this process. However, for this to work, universities must jealously and vigorously claim an institutional control of their almanac.

As universities expanded, often with a reckless abandon, the employ of academic staff was curiously stagnated and those of administrative staff ballooned. It meant one thing. Whilst numbers of students increased tenfold, the human resource directly handling academics and the exam process did not.

Overworked and underpaid

The average university don is a pale shadow of his counterpart in the 1990s and early 2000s. He or she is overworked, demoralised and underpaid. To make ends meet, and to service geographically dispersed campuses, survival trumps precision. Without intending, and in a context of uncertainties, huge classes, fatigue and empty pockets, examination grades become just another “thing” bereft of meaning in the everyday of the university don.

Missing marks are also symptomatic of a dysfunctional records management system. Like the proverbial ‘lost or misplaced’ files in a public office, missing marks reflect not only how records are managed, but also the little attention paid to them. The reality is that the records management systems of spring files and paper that worked in the ‘80s and ‘90s cannot possibly work now. Universities must invest in digital, automated and amalgamated systems of managing relevant aspects of student life in the institution.

The moral dilemmas, for both students and academics, spring from such poor records management. For slothful and reckless students given to truancy, missing marks have become a convenient excuse served to unsuspecting parents. The mischievous ones know that simply lodging a complaint of a missing mark will somehow reproduce a mark for an exam not sat. This hanky-panky must surely stop.

- Dr Omanga is lecturer of Media Studies at Moi University