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Pamela Shumba Senior Reporter
THE government has introduced an electronic “tamper proof” system to curb public examination paper leakage, the Deputy Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Professor Paul Mavhima has said.

Responding to concerns raised in Parliament on Wednesday over examination leakages, Prof Mavhima said a reliable electronic system has been put in place to plug recurrent Zimbabwe School Examinations Council (Zimsec) examination paper leakages.

The “gridlock technology”, which the examinations body says was used in South Africa last year, will see question papers placed in sealed boxes with security codes remotely controlled from a command centre at the Zimsec Head Office.

The electronic boxes open simultaneously nationwide at a prescribed time and date of writing of an examination. The technology can record attempts to tamper with it.

Headmasters from all the 2,500 O’Level and A’Level centres in the country will only be able to open the boxes using the electronic system.

“Starting this year, we’ve made sure that we plug most of the holes. Last year, we realised that it wasn’t really at Zimsec that the leakage came from but it was one of the companies that we outsourced services from that was a source of it. Therefore, we’ve instituted some measures to ensure that it doesn’t happen again from that source this year.

“We’ve also made sure that there are several security arrangements in place especially when exams are in transit, when they leave Zimsec until they get to the exam centres themselves. There is some technology implementation that we’ve done in order to make sure that papers are not tampered with until they get to the centre,” said Prof Mavhima.

He said it was now easier to deal with issues at the centres because there is a clear line of responsibility with headmasters.

“Once the examination papers get to the centres, we can easily trace any leakages. I’m happy to say that so far, we’ve not received any report of exam leakages this year. We still have to see how foolproof the system is,” said Prof Mavhima.

Early this year, Zimsec director Esau Nhandara said the government would spend $5 million on technology to curb the leaking of exam papers.

Zimsec has been battling recurrent leakages of examination papers. Last year, four examination papers leaked in the Midlands Province, while in 2012 about 13 examination papers were lost, forcing Zimsec to reset the papers, costing the examination body about $800, 000.

In 2013, the Geography and Integrated Science exam papers leaked again in the same province.

The Zimsec Grade Seven examinations started this week, with the O’Level and the A’Level examinations starting later this month.