Punish headteachers

SENIOR One selections begin today. But 12,065 candidates from 322 centres will not join secondary school. Their results were cancelled for examinations cheating. This tough stance by UNEB should act as a warning to the would-be cheats in future examinations. All the cancelled results were due to external assistance mainly through collusion between the supervisors, the headteachers or teachers in some cases with full knowledge of the district education officers.The big question then is, was UNEB right to cancel the results without giving the candidates alternative papers to sit? The blanket cancelling of the results punishes the pupils and parents rather than the perpetrators of the cheating. At P7, these children are too young to influence their teachers or headteachers to cheat for them the examinations. It is the school authorities who initiate the cheating to give parents a false view that the school performs well. When a headteacher or teacher picks a piece of chalk, writes the examinations answers boldly on the blackboard for the candidates to copy, whose fault is it? ends