The Amalgamated Rural Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) has demanded the nullification of the November 2022 Ordinary and Advanced Level Zimbabwe School Examinations Council (ZIMSEC) examinations.
This comes after five hundred and eighty-eight (588) candidates were caught cheating while sitting for the examinations.
In a post on Twitter, ARTUZ alleged that some candidates were reproducing the ZIMSEC marking scheme word to word, with some schools recording uniform answers. ARTUZ said:
[The police] will have to nab more cheats. The cheating is beyond measure. We are learning that learners were reproducing the ZIMSEC marking scheme word to word.
Uniform answers whole school. We can’t conceal this. We should protect the integrity of our public exams. CID at UCE [United College of Education] in [Bulawayo] now.
In another tweet, ARTUZ said “We call upon [ZIMSEC] to nullify these examinations. The whole exercise is now turning out to be a joke.”
Last week on Thursday, the ZIMSEC deputy director Farai Zisengwe and the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education Director Barnabas Mangosho appeared before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education led by Torerai Moyo.
Responding to legislators on the issue of the widespread leakage of examination papers, Zisengwe said:
This is an issue that has not been concluded. We are doing the assessment and we are marking to identify these cheats.
About 588 candidates were caught along the way, but we believe there are more who will be caught during the marking period.
The board is going to be seized with the issue and we can confidently say Advanced Level results will be out in early January, but for Ordinary Level, we cannot say the same.