Yesterday, the Rwanda Education Board (REB) released results for the 2014 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) and O’Level exams indicating an improvement in general performance compared to 2013. However, even more interesting was the revelation that cases of examination malpractice drastically reduced compared to 2013.

Only 88 cases of exam malpractices in PLE were registered in 2014 compared to 1,324 in 2013, while in O’ level, the cases reduced to 93 from 203.

Exam malpractices is a big challenge that national examination bodies face across the region as unscrupulous people try all means to get leaked papers and avail them to candidates to give them unfair advantage.

In some cases, the cheating is aided by school heads that want to ensure that their candidates pass highly and subsequently have more learners flocking their respective ‘star’ schools.

As a result of this ‘rat race’, some schools engage in different forms of malpractices during national exams.

The declining trend in exam malpractices has largely been attributed to the new grading system which does not rank schools or districts according to their respective performance levels in national exams, thereby removing the possibility of perceived bragging rights for those that excelled – which officials believed provoked others to by unisales" href="#">resort to all sorts of maneuvers to ‘do better’ next time round.

Education stakeholders who contributed to the achievement of reduced exam malpractice should be commended and encouraged to keep up the good work with a target to register zero cases of exam malpractices in the future.

To completely wipe out exam malpractice, strict measures must be taken while raising people’s awareness on the dangers of exam malpractices and taking punitive measures against those involved.

As soon as a child starts school, they should be inculcated with the values of reading hard as the only road to academic excellence both in regular school exams and national exams.

Once the pupils go through the education system with these values, they will not be tempted by anyone to engage in cheating either during national exams or even after they graduate and join the labour market.