Over 370,000 KCPE and KCSE students deregistered

About 370, 000 primary and secondary students have been deregistered by the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) and will not sit for this year’s national exam until they provide the right documents.

According to the Standard Newspaper, headteachers and parents colluded to provide fake birth certificates to register Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) candidates.

“We have listed several cases where schools manipulated the birth registration data to register candidates. Some just entered zeros while others entered some funny digits. we detected all these and cancelled their registrations,” KNEC Chief Executive Officer, Mercy Karogo said.

According to a report presented before parliament last week by former Education Cabinet Secretary, Amina Mohammed, birth certificate numbers were duplicated and typing errors made in the keying in of birth entry numbers.

The examination body has noted that the anomalies could have happened as a result of lack of verification of registration details by the candidates which was scheduled for February 16 to 22.

KNEC has also discovered that some teachers signed the registration forms on the students’ behalf during the verification process. Some examination centres are also under investigation for suspicion that they used fake data to register candidates to maintain their schools as examination centres.

KNEC data has revealed that most malpractices occurred in primary schools with Meru county leading the pack at 23,806 KCPE and 3,646 KCSE candidates being deregistered. In Marsabit, there were fewer malpractices as only 45 candidates were deregistered with 42 of them being KCPE candidates.

The KNEC CEO urged the affected institutions to go ahead and verify the registration data.

“We shall not process these candidates for the national examinations unless the correct data is entered because we use clean data,” said the CEO.