The Kenya National Examination Council has changed tune on fraudulent candidate registration for national examinations and decided to give the offenders a second chance.
Standard Eight and Form Four candidates who have posted fake birth certificate numbers to register for this year’s national exams now have until Friday next week to rectify their records or be deregistered, the Kenya National Examination Council has warned.
Knec CEO Mercy Karogo Monday said at the end of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Examination (KCPE) and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams registration that the council suspected that a number of candidates had posted fake birth certificate numbers.
“For this year, the council has directed all candidates without birth certificates or those who posted fake numbers to ensure they get the document by Wednesday, March 6, and post them online by Friday March 15,” she said.
Knec statistics show that primary schools were the most affected.
Over 370,000 candidates were found to have uploaded fake documents when they were applying for their national examinations.
Of the affected students, 346,916 are KCPE candidates while 28,713 are in secondary school.
This year, Knec registered 1.78 million candidates for the 2019 examinations.
Of the registered students, 1,089,671 were for KCPE while 698,935 were for KCSE in 10,304 examination centres.
Ms Karogo insisted that the agency will not allow any irregularities in the exam registration.
The candidates were required to verify their registration between February 16 and 22 by sending their index numbers to 20076 and report any anomaly to the exam council.
But, Ms Karogo said, some parents seemed to have colluded with headteachers to post the fake documents as they did not conduct the verification exercise.
Ms Karogo said the Knec registration system is not linked to the Integrated Population Registration Service and “a number of students took advantage to post suspicious birth certificate numbers such as 0000,123456, which are clearly fake numbers.”
During registration, candidates are expected to provide their original birth certificate to school heads.
The schools are then expected to enter details of the correct birth certificate and legitimate photographs of respective candidates.
She said, they expected the school heads and parents to provide the correct details but they shocked to find such glaring mistakes and anomalies.
“Any candidate who will upload the correct details of their birth certificate numbers will be disqualified from sitting for this year’s exams,” she said.
She said, the examination council is also investigating Centre’s that used fake documents to register students to meet the required number of candidates for a school to qualify as a centre.
Normally, a centre is required by Knec to register between six to 15 candidates.