Time to rethink composition, structure of university governance

President Uhuru Kenyatta (centre) Acting Education CS Fred Matiang’i (left) ICT CS Joe Mucheru and pupils from various schools during the launch of the new curriculum text books. [Elvis Ogina.Standard]

For two years now, a Tsunami has swept through Kenya’s examination system. As a result of ongoing exam reforms, only about 10 per cent of those who sat the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) will join local universities. 

KCSE serves many purposes. It is a marker of academic mobility, university entrance, social status and employability. As an exit exam, it plays the role of stratification in university admissions, where these results determine preferences in higher education placement.

Much has been said, especially on the high number of failures in the last two years. The opposition insists on a formal probe. We seem to forget too fast our murky history with national exams. Before the current examination reforms, we had nearly entrenched a disturbing culture of cheating.

We unashamedly celebrated ‘stolen’ grades each time results were released. For those decrying the lack of a normal curve in the current exam, the epoch before 2016 did not even pretend to have one. In one notable case, a school had everyone scoring straight ‘As’, save for one or two students.

This is not a normal curve. I am informed that most schools would have some ungodly liaison with cartels inside the discredited examinations council where for an agreed fee, results would be massaged.

According to Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i, the window between Christmas and end of February was when this malfeasance, appropriately named moderation, took place.

In Africa, national exams continue to be sources of controversy in many respects. Cases of widespread cheating are not uncommon. For long, Egypt and South Africa have battled exam cheating, with Egyptian strongman Abdel Fatah el-Sisi recently endorsing punitive jail terms for those found culpable.

In South Africa, a matric exam that ordinarily involves about 700,000 students has over the years been the subject of widespread cheating. In Tanzania, mass failures like the one recently duplicated in Kenya forced the intervention of then President Jakaya Kikwete to order an adjustment of the minimum mark required to gain entry into university.

The then examinations boss, Joyce Ndalichako, resigned following what was clearly support of mediocrity from the highest office.

Upon capturing power, President John Magufuli revisited the issue. He reversed Kikwete’s orders and drove the reform message home by appointing Prof Ndalichako as the country’s Education minister.

Unfair practice

Like Tanzania, a nearly dysfunctional examination system in Kenya where national examinations grading were at risk of losing credibility due to leaks, cheating and an improbable pass rate, had its most pernicious impact on higher education.

Generally, universities began receiving a higher number of students both from the regular state sponsored system and the privately sponsored models. Because of the high pass rates, competition for the so named professional and competitive courses like medicine, law and engineering was down to the wire, with university administrators often forced to make random selection from sets of uniformly qualified students.

This was often an unfair practice. Notably, the fabulous pass rates were at the centre of nourishing a mercantile culture in universities, where demand surpassed supply. To meet the demand, universities spread like plague. Outposts were erected in the most unlikely of places, calling to doubt quality of higher education and more important, highlighting the misplaced priorities within the academe. Universities served and worshiped mammon.   

Classes that would ordinarily sit about 40 students were compelled to take as many as double the capacity. The expansion was not organic. It did not correspond with the logical expansion of facilities and badly needed human resource. Facilities were stretched and faculty overworked. Ironically, in a context of large sums of money flowing into universities, few expanded physical facilities and infrastructure.

It was a resource curse. Private universities flourished in this time too, with one or two launching a national (even regional) expansionist spread that became emblematic of how not to grow higher education. The previously hallowed stature of higher education in Kenya regionally, suffered. Worse, research output from universities was at its lowest, a harsh indictment of the high number of chartered universities. Quantity had trumped quality. At the micro level, universities received students who in many ways fell short of the quality needed for higher education.

For those who teach in the universities, the change in the holistic capability of students coming through from high school was easily noticeable. Many of my colleagues agree that we often received students whose abilities did not correspond with the grades received at KCSE.

Riskier option

Many had poor writing skills, and a good number could barely sustain a logical conversation in English, or good Kiswahili. Teaching was not easy, because many students anticipated the rote learning long entrenched in high schools. Synthesizing and independently using class readings were, and still is, a huge challenge. In programmes like medicine and engineering, attrition and wastage rates were excessively high with more than 50 per cent falling along the way.

The straight ‘As’ celebrated on national TV rarely translated the same successes in university lecture rooms.  The ongoing exam reforms will continue to have far reaching impact on higher education. First and most obvious is the transformation of what was popularly known as ‘parallel’ degree programmes. I disagree with those who think these programmes will disappear. They will not.

While admissions into the ‘parallel’ programme will drastically drop, well endowed parents will have the agency to transfer their children from less competitive to the more competitive degree programmes. This means the arena of action for parallel programmes will be circumscribed within a pool of already qualified and admitted students.

The same applies to admission into private universities. This also means fault lines along social strata will become more visible especially in programmes considered competitive. While at the micro level, universities are already receiving comparatively more capable students, one of the unintended outcomes of ongoing reforms is that KCSE, as a university entrance examination, will suffer a kind of crisis.

As shown, only about 10 per cent of students sitting KCSE will qualify to directly join any university in Kenya, both public and private. If this trend is sustained, KCSE is officially the least probable route to universities compared to other international curricular offered locally.

At a pass rate of only 10 per cent, KCSE is a far riskier option compared to GCSE, which has a 94 per cent pass rate. The increasingly popular ICCE (International Certificate of Christian Education) an equivalent to the Cambridge University entrance certificate has, partly due to its mastery based learning, a 99 per cent pass rate. While these curricular are facilitative in nature, KCSE is now practically restrictive.

In a country where a university degree is deified, KCSE is seen as a weapon of mass condemnation. Within a context of a liberalised university system of admission but a vastly constrained admission criterion from the main national exam, the current reforms will be a bonanza for schools offering alternative, international curricular.

Unfortunately, the high costs charged by these schools mean social inequality will likely increase, and the face of university education will still retain its beaming middle class gaze. 

- The writer is head, Department of Publishing and Media Studies, Moi University