Traditionally, at the end of every academic year, hundreds of thousand of students in Uganda sit for final exams as a hurdle to their next level of education. The mandate to organise these exams is solely UNEB’s, a body that was established in 1983. According to Wikipedia, the body is mandated to conduct and manage examinations in Uganda for the end of the educational cycle at the primary and secondary school level and to conduct examination-related research.
This year, a total of 349,445 candidates were registered and scheduled to sit the O level examinations from 3703 Examination Centres. Computer Studies is one of the subjects done at O Level where students have to do both Paper 1 and Paper 2.
Like every year, Term III is a busy one for the ICT departments as students and their computer labs are fine tuned for maximum performanceof in the final exam. This involved inviting facilitators, doing repairs in the labs and buying empty CDs for the practical paper.
What is involved in Paper 2?
While this is done every year, no one expected that it would be hard to get empty CDs on the market. In previous years, a 50 pack tin of empty CD recordables went for a maximum of 35,000/= Uganda shillings. In fact, when I was invited to do lab maintenance at a school in Luwero, I was asked to bring along with me a pack for which I quoted thr normal rate. I was in fro a surprise when I went to Kampala to find the packs at 70,000/=, twice the priicer I had quoted.
For obvious reasons, there was now way I was going to use my own funds to buy the CDs. I requested that I would refund the money and the teacher would look for alternatives.
Meanwhile, as the exam came closer, there were frantic efforts by schools to acquire the empty CDs. A good friend of mine, a head teacher in one of the government schools took it upon himself to look for the CDs. He was baffled to learn that the 50 CD pack was now at 100,000/=.
This is when the debate in our circles heightened. The question was whether UNEB accepted other methods of delivering soft copies of the candidates work.
