The new Uganda National Examinations Board -UNEB Bill which seeks to repeal the 1983 Act creates reforms relating to the administration and management of primary and secondary national examinations. The bill suggested several stringent measures to curb the malpractice in all three sets of national examinations.

The bill suggested that anyone is caught cheating in national examinations should be jailed for 10-years or pay a fine of 40 million Shillings or both. It also suggested that a similar punishment be given to individuals who have been misappropriating examination registration fees for candidates.

UNEB’s Executive Secretary Dan Odongo says the new legislation has several aspects that would enable them to curb malpractices during the examination period and strengthen the administration and management of the process. He appealed to the education minister Janet Kataaha Museveni to inform the president to expedite assenting to the bill before the examinations begin.

According to the revised school calendar, primary seven candidates will undergo a briefing on March 26 and write Primary Leaving Examinations on March 30 and 31, 2021, while their senior four counterparts will be briefed for examination on February 26, and sit for examinations starting March 1. The senior six candidates will be briefed on April 9 and start their respective examinations on April 12.

A total of 1,181,940 candidates registered to undertake examinations this year. They include 749,807 for Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE), 333,766 for the Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) and 98,367 for the Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education-UACE.

Odongo notes that the board has not changed any of its examinations management processes. But, he adds that they need more examination rooms to adhere to social distance rules which call for more human resource in form of invigilators. UNEB also intends to increase the number of marking centres and examiners.

However, several educationists have over time noted that the enactment of a new law may not necessarily end examination malpractice in Uganda.

Malpractice has been attributed to several factors including commercialization of education, which results in stiff competition between schools, desire for parents to have their children in the best schools, increasing pressure on teachers and school administrators to produce results among others.

Over the years, the examination body has been tightening the grip to curb the vice. among the recent strategies was the introduction of ‘random numbers’ to eliminate malpractice orchestrated during marking.

UNEB has already presented a 10.5 billion Shillings supplementary budget. Although legislators were questioning the expenditures saying the quoted prices ‘appear grossly inflated, the Education minister Janet Museveni has assured the board that she will make sure that they receive all the amount of money they need and on time.

Mr Dan Odongo, the Uneb executive secretary, said the exams are being held in 2021 because of the need to make up for the time lost by the candidates during the Covid-19 induced lockdown.

Briefings for Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) will be conducted on February 26, with the exams starting on March 1, beginning with Physics practical and IPS Art Still Life/Nature. The exams will end on April 6 with Technical Drawing and Electrical Practice, among others.

Candidates for the Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education (UACE) will be briefed on April 9 and sit the exams on April 12, starting with European History, World Affairs since 1939, and Mathematics and end on May 3 with Imaginative Composition in Colour.

Primary Seven
Briefing of candidates for Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) will be held on March 26, with the candidates starting the exams on March 30, beginning with Mathematics,  Social Studies and Religious Education. They will end the exams on March 31 with Integrated Science and English.

Mr Odongo called on all stakeholders to observe the standard operating procedures (SOPs) given that the exams come at a time when the country is still grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic.ADVERTISEMENT

“The Board is equally conscious of the fact that the examination process will be bringing many persons together, especially the candidates who must gather in designated examination halls or rooms to write their examinations. The Covid-19 pandemic makes it imperative for us to take into account the health and safety of the learners, as well as those conducting the examinations,” Mr Odongo said yesterday.

This year, a total of 1,181,965 candidates for all the three levels are set to sit their final exams, with 51.1 per cent of them being female, according to Uneb.

A total of 749,811 candidates are set to sit the PLE exams, with another   333,775 taking UCE and 98,379 UACE.

There has been a drop in the number of candidates siting for UCE. A total of 337,697 candidates registered for the 2019 UCE exams, with 168,639 of them being male and 169,058 female.
But this year registered a total of 167,481 female and 166,294 male to sit the exams.

UNEB has warned that breach of regulations and involvement in exams malpractice will lead to disqualification or cancellation of results of a candidate or of all candidates at a centre.

Mr Odongo revealed that the Uneb Bill 2020 has been passed into law by Parliament and is pending assent by the President.
“The Bill has expanded the scope of offences and sanctions. If it is assented to during this period the examinations shall be conducted in accordance with the new law,” Mr Odongo said in a statement.

UNEB has requested all faiths to dedicate February 26 to 28 for prayer and worship for the candidates, as well as the entire examination process.

The Na­tional Cur­ricu­lum De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre has made ad­just­ments in the teach­ing sub­jects for the lower sec­ondary, for ex­am­ple, teach­ing sub­jects have been re­duced from 43 to 21. In the new ap­proved cur­ricu­lum, schools will teach 12 sub­jects at Se­nior One and Two, out of which 11 will be com­pul­sory while one will be from an elec­tive menu (op­tional). Stu­dents at lev­els Three and Four will exit with a min­i­mum of eight or a max­i­mum of nine sub­jects with seven of them com­pul­sory.

Con­se­quently, some sub­jects have taken dif­fer­ent forms: Mu­sic has now in­cluded dance and drama to be­come Per­form­ing Arts; Fine Art has been re­designed to in­clude el­e­ments of de­sign and it is now called Art and De­sign; Tech­ni­cal Draw­ing has been in­te­grated with el­e­ments of wood­work and met­al­work and tech­nol­ogy and it is now called Tech­nol­ogy and De­sign; His­tory has been in­te­grated with Po­lit­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion; Ac­counts and Com­merce have been in­te­grated in En­tre­pre­neur­ship ed­u­ca­tion, and His­tory has been in­te­grated with Po­lit­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion.

Un­der the new cur­ricu­lum, teach­ers will com­pile the learn­ers’ achieve­ments un­der the For­ma­tive As­sess­ment in the four-year cy­cle, find an av­er­age score and sub­mit it to the Uganda Na­tional Ex­am­i­na­tions Board to con­tribute at least 20 per cent in the fi­nal na­tional ex­am­i­na­tions grad­ing. The Chi­nese lan­guage has been added to the menu of for­eign lan­guages while Kiswahili, Phys­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion and en­tre­pre­neur­ship will be com­pul­sory for all stu­dents in Se­nior One and Two.

The aim of chang­ing the cur­ricu­lum 

The new ped­a­gogy aims at pro­vid­ing to the learn­ers 21st Cen­tury skills which in­clude; crit­i­cal think­ing, cre­ativ­ity, col­lab­o­ra­tion or team­work, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, in­for­ma­tion lit­er­acy, ICT, and flex­i­bil­ity. This is ob­vi­ously good news to the na­tion, how­ever, the per­turb­ing ques­tion is whether this will be im­ple­mented amidst the fa­cil­ity in­ad­e­qua­cies in most of the Ugan­dan schools. For the learn­ers to be­come cre­ative es­pe­cially in ICT and the nat­ural sci­ences, there must be nec­es­sary equip­ment such as well-fur­nished lab­o­ra­to­ries, ef­fec­tive in­ter­net and ob­vi­ously knowl­edge­able train­ers. These are not pre­sent in most of the rural schools in Uganda which are pre­dom­i­nantly knowl­edge hubs for most of the young peo­ple.

Will the new cur­ricu­lum cure the de­fi­cien­cies in the old cur­ricu­lum?

The State of Youth Re­port 2019 by Cen­tre for Pol­icy Analy­sis in­di­cated that the ma­jor­ity of the youth de­manded more prac­ti­cal sub­jects and over 50% of them re­vealed that the ed­u­ca­tion they had re­ceived had not pre­pared them for the avail­able op­por­tu­ni­ties in the labour mar­ket. The old cur­ricu­lum could not equip the learn­ers with thor­ough skills and knowl­edge to be­come in­no­v­a­tive in or­der to cre­ate jobs but rather teaches them more of the­o­ret­i­cal work than prac­ti­cal skills and that ex­plains the high lev­els of un­em­ploy­ment in Uganda.

I ob­serve that the dif­fer­ence be­tween the old cur­ricu­lum and the new Cur­ricu­lum is that the sub­jects have re­duced in num­ber and some have taken dif­fer­ent forms. Chang­ing names of the sub­jects may not yield much but rather em­pha­sis should be put on the con­tent taught in class. There is no way of at­tain­ing dif­fer­ent re­sults when things are con­tin­ued to be done as usual. The dilemma is when the pre­sumed prac­ti­cal sub­jects such as ICT, wood­work and met­al­work re­main be­ing taught in the­ory. If the learn­ers are not ex­posed to the ac­tual prac­tice in these sub­jects, it de­feats the pur­pose for which the cur­ricu­lum was re­viewed.

In my opin­ion, the only way the new cur­ricu­lum can equip learn­ers with prac­ti­cal skills is when the train­ers in schools teach prac­ti­cal sub­jects ‘prac­ti­cally.’ Teach­ing com­puter skills to the stu­dents with­out demon­strat­ing on a com­puter makes com­put­ing a hoax to the learn­ers. Sim­i­larly, the wood­work class does not make more sense if there are no wood and equip­ment for prac­tice. An­other im­por­tant thing which I think the cur­ricu­lum is not clear about is the abil­ity of learn­ers to make de­ci­sions on what they want to be taught. Many times, the mode of teach­ing has been teacher-cen­tered which makes the teach­ers have all the lever­age of de­ter­min­ing what is to be taught. Deny­ing the learn­ers an op­por­tu­nity to par­tic­i­pate in de­ter­min­ing what skills they should be taught, pre­sents them in a sit­u­a­tion of study­ing the con­tent which they may not be in­ter­ested in. It is, there­fore, no­ble that the leaner is put at the cen­tre of learn­ing.

Be­ing aware of the gen­der stereo­types on sci­ence and prac­ti­cal sub­jects, I pro­pose that fe­male stu­dents be pri­ori­tised by the train­ers while teach­ing these prac­ti­cal sub­jects and be given all the nec­es­sary sup­port they de­serve. In fact, there should be de­lib­er­ate ef­forts by the stake­hold­ers in ed­u­ca­tion to equip the ‘girl-child’ with prac­ti­cal and soft skills which will en­able her to quickly join the labour mar­ket so as to re­duce her so­cioe­co­nomic vul­ner­a­bil­ity.

According to the ministry’s schedule, the sub candidate classes of Primary Six, Senior Three and Senior Five will report first on March 1 and study for 14 weeks, breaking off on May 21.

Primary Four and Five classes will study for eight weeks starting on April 6 after Primary Leaving Examinations and end on June 4 to create space for lower primary pupils in Primary 1, 2, and 3 to come in on June 7.  
“Primary 1, 2, and 3 will study for eight weeks which end on July 24,” the ministry’s permanent secretary, Mr Alex Kakooza, said in a statement.

Mr Museveni closed all education institutions abruptly in March last year after the coronavirus outbreak. The institutions were in their first term of the academic year and subsequently missed two terms in the year.
 
Mr Kakooza said Senior One students are expected at school on April 12 to study for 14 weeks which end on July 3 while Senior Two will report on May 31 after Senior Three and Senior Five classes have gone for holiday and study for 10 weeks which will be concluded on July 24.

The release of the time table comes two days after Daily Monitor broke the story of the full schedule of school’s reopening.
Mr Kakooza said this return to school timetable will mark the closure of 2020 academic year with some classes getting a longer term and others staying at school briefly.

However, the new school calendar does not offer how or when the next academic year will begin.
Mr Kakooza indicated that when learners return, they will only look at covering the syllabus that was expected to be covered in two terms and in case they don’t conclude, a new strategy will be issued to guide how the lost time is recovered in the coming academic years

“Academic year 2020 for primary schools, secondary schools and post-primary education institutions will end in July. A comprehensive school calendar for 2021 academic year, as well as a strategy for recovery of lost time, will be issued. Progression to the next class will be based on attendance and continuous assessment of classwork and assignments,” Mr Kakooza noted.

He added: “In that calendar, there is no holiday. Let us first complete that calendar. We will talk about holidays after. We are trying to finish this academic year.”
He also said all students in technical and vocational institutes and teacher training colleges were cleared to report on March 1 while university students will report in a phased manner because their facilities can’t accommodate their current enrolment under a two meter social distance required by the Ministry of Health.

Summary of timetable
•Primary Six, Senior Three and Senior Five will report on March 1  and study for 14 weeks, breaking off on May 21.
•Primary Four and Five classes will study for eight weeks, starting on April 6 and end on June 4.
•Primary 1, 2, and 3 to come in on June 7 and study for eight weeks, which will end on July 24
•Senior One students are expected at school on April 12 to study for 14 weeks, which end on July 3.
•Senior Two will report on May 31 and study for 10 weeks, which will be concluded on July 24