The Mozambican Minister
of Education, Jorge Ferrao, on Wednesday declared “zero tolerance” of academic
fraud.He was reacting to the latest cheating scandal, concerning the 12th grade
extraordinary examinations held in August. An investigation into 43 of the
country’s 200 public secondary schools confirmed that cheating had taken place
in nine schools, involving 407 pupils.Cited by the independent television
station STV, Ferrao said there had been far too much tolerance of cheating in
the past. “Over the years, it has become the practice to accept that exam
secrecy is violated and that the process is falsified”, he said.
In those schools where
fraud was detected this time, “the finding is that these schools have been
permissive”, he said. “This is something which makes us, as a Ministry, very
sad. We look fraudulent, and we do not deserve this”. If the Ministry were to
take no action, he said, it would be deceiving the pupils’ families, their
future employers, and society as a whole. A school certificate should show
employers what a student is worth –“but when we send him into the world of
work, we find that he has difficulties. That’s a whole chain of investment that
has failed”.The general inspector of the Education Ministry, Quiteria Mabote,
said that, whereas in the past students might smuggle the answers to exam
questions into the examination room scribbled on a piece of paper, nowadays they
use mobile phones.There were strong indications of cheating, she said, since
there was no other reasonable explanation for students in a class answering in
exactly the same way to exam questions, and thus obtaining exactly the same
high marks.For this to occur, the
chain of exam secrecy must be broken, and Mabote admitted that the Ministry
does not yet know where the leaks take place. “If we knew how the exams are
leaked, we would staunch the evil at its root”, she said. “We take every
measure to prevent material from being leaked, but even so, leaks happen”.She guaranteed that the
Ministry would look at all 12th grade students in the schools affected, and
those who were not involved in cheating will receive their exam results. Also
on Wednesday, Ferrao announced that the Ministry expects to enrol about 1.32
million pupils in the first grade of primary education in 2016.At first sight, this
figure seems surprisingly high. The age at which children should enter primary
school is six, and projections from the 2007 population census suggest that
there are no more than 780,000 six year olds in the country.But, according to
education officials contacted , many parents do not enroll their children
in school at the right age. This means that many of the children who will step
inside a school for the first time in 2016 are seven or eight years old, or
even older.Ferrao gave the figure for first grade enrolment at a ceremony where
a memorandum of understanding was signed with the Portuguese embassy for
support in the training of education staff. He said that the Ministry has been
hiring around 8,500 new teachers every year, to ensure good quality education.But the country remains
short of teachers with adequate educational training. The Ministry, Ferrao
said, had therefore began to cooperate with Brazil to train the instructors who
will work at Mozambique’s 24 teacher training institutes.
He hoped that, under the
new memorandum of understanding “we will have more teachers trained in
Portugal”.
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