Top university launches probe into fake degree claims

Gilbert Nganga

Barely a fortnight after a TV exposé unearthed a diploma mill at one of Kenya’s leading aviation colleges, Uganda’s top university launched a probe into an alleged racket involving fake degrees awarded to students.

Officials at Makerere University said that among more than 12,000 recent graduates from the institution, at least 600 did not meet minimum requirements after examinations were deliberately altered.

Uganda’s Daily Monitor reported last Wednesday that in the case of Makerere, there had been earlier allegations of students graduating without completing research and of people not studying at all but faking graduation to deceive their parents or guardians.

There had also been claims of lecturers not marking scripts and forging results, of missing marks, and of students who scored below the pass mark somehow finding their way onto graduation lists.

“Whatever our shortcomings, we are ready to make changes,” Professor Okello Ogwang, deputy vice-chancellor for academic affairs at Makerere University told reporters in Kampala.

“As a public institution that receives public funding, we have a duty to the public and employers to maintain the integrity of our results, and if any culprits are found, appropriate action will be taken.”

The two incidents have tainted the reputation of higher education in Kenya and Uganda, with possible image ripple effects across the other East African countries of Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.

The five East African Community member states are working out a plan that will see them harmonise their higher education systems. They have already crafted a credit transfer system and a qualifications model.

The quality problem

“The quality of education is a big problem. This is because the demand for higher education has grown so rapidly,” said Professor Mayunga Nkunya, executive secretary of the Inter-University Council for East Africa, or IUCEA, in an interview.

“We were not prepared to ensure that the rapid expansion could be easily absorbed. We are expanding in the absence of basic requirements like enough lecturers, books and infrastructure.

“We have to live with it. Higher education in the East African Community has been seriously neglected over the years. However, this is changing. We have to admit as many students as we can but must guarantee quality. The situation is bad,” he said.

Late last year, findings of a study by the IUCEA showed that at least half the graduates produced by East African universities were ‘half-baked’ for the job market.

Uganda had the worst record, with at least 63% of graduates found to lack job market skills. It was followed closely by Tanzania, where 61% of graduates were ill-prepared. In Burundi and Rwanda, 55% and 52% of graduates respectively were perceived to be competent, while in Kenya, 51% of graduates were believed to be unfit for jobs.

Kenya scandal

In Kenya, the TV story uncovered widespread rot in higher education institutions, many of which engage in academic malpractices and some of which are dishing out qualifications without requiring a person to step into a classroom or study.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has taken a swipe at education institutions following concerns of falling quality, especially in higher education. He said quality was wanting, and that going forward, standards must meet the basic requirements for human capital development.

“The quality of education speaks to the quality of societies, and the quality of the governance of nations. Quality education means nothing if the key participants, that is, the learner and the teacher, are not firmly joined in a win-win dynamic,” Kenyatta told an African education conference in Nairobi.

His comments highlighted growing frustration among public and private sector leaders over learning processes and outcomes in Kenya.

“My government is investing more resources than any other administration, in efforts to radically transform teaching and learning in Kenya,” Kenyatta continued.

“We have adopted education as a key feature of the government’s transformative agenda, to accelerate and improve access, quality and impact of education through substantial, demonstrable and impactful measures. We are also committed to quality teaching as well as quality learning,” he said.

Kenya prides itself as the hub for education in East Africa, with an emphasis on science and technology, and has an eye to growing the export of education services to the region. Such ambitions will at the very least be undermined by diploma mill and quality scandals.

Source: universityworldnews