GCE Board debunks claims of leakage

The 2015 session of examinations organised by the Cameroon General Certificate of Education (GCE) Board wrapped up last Thursday amidst claims that the exams were leaked.

A few months before the exams, the Registrar of the GCE Board issued a public statement cautioning Cameroonians about some fake GCE questions which were being circulated and warning candidates to steer clear of such malpractices.

“Those were not GCE questions but the perpetrators of the act wanted the potential candidates to know that GCE questions can leak,” a trusted source at the GCE Board told The SUN.

Speaking in an interview at the end of the exams, Denis Ndasi Mofor, Deputy Registrar of the GCE Board denied claims that the exams were leaked. “The 2015 conduct of the GCE Board exams has gone smoothly. We had a few detractions like when news came out that there were GCE questions in circulation. We found out that these were pre-prepared materials and we asked the students who were detained to be released.

“The serious malpractices during this phase of the exam were cases of impersonation. Impersonation is not only an examination malpractice, it is also criminal. In such cases, the chiefs of centres handed the culprits to the police. There was a case in GBHS Muyuka, GBHS Muea, the Douala cases and others all over the national territory are still coming down to us. We’ll catalogue and know the exact statistics,” he said.

However, despite this strong rebuttal by the GCE Board authorities, other sources are adamant that there was a leakage eventhough they acknowledge that the integrity of the exams was not violated as the authorities worked frantically hard to repair any possible damage.

A source, who asked for anonymity noted that “for at least 17 years the GCE Board has been a member of an international assessment organization where methods of guaranteeing the security of public examinations is studied and practiced as a system. A system in which handling such examination malpractices as leakages are taught and can be dealt with spontaneously.

“The only problem that the GCE Board faced with this year’s leakage, as always, was the financial cost of handling the problem, especially as we are dealing with a government which refused the creation of an assessment organization and has never repented for it. Assessment boards are not in the psyche of the entire francophone world,” the source went on.

The SUN learnt that the GCE Board was quick to deal with this year’s leakage. But the question that begs itself is who commandeered this scam and for what purpose? Our source continued that “One can excuse the Registrar if he contends that there was no leakage for what happened is actually an act of sabotage. The recklessness of the act smacks of a deliberate intention to destroy and degrade a system that is acknowledged the world – over as a reliable system of standards and values.

“The idea is to give a dog a bad name to hang it so those who orchestrated this scam just set out to expose the system, discredit it and take advantage of the confusion thus created to impose their own agenda.

“The origin of the leakage has still not been traced despite the fact that both the GCE Board and the various teachers’ trade unions are making frantic efforts to find the real culprits. The final report of the investigations will at best be sketchy. The real culprit will remain in the dark,” our source hinted.

Another important question could be; who benefits from the act? The person who benefits from it is capable of orchestrating it. This year’s leakage is exactly akin to the one which took place in 1996 except that it is in a much smaller scale. So who leaked the 2015 GCE examination?

From 6,500 markers last year, over 7,000 markers are expected to correct the exam scripts when marking begins on June 29.