National Exams

Since our secondary school only has the first cycle (grades 8-10), the 10th grade National Exams are the culmination of our students’ academic careers. National Exams are high stakes, anyone failing to pass has to repeat 10th grade and try again the next year. As the name implies, National Exams are a Mozambican-wide phenomenon, each 10th grade student taking the exact same test at the exact same time from Maputo all the way to Tete. That’s why on Thursday when Maputo city suspended exams for its municipal holiday, everyone else in the country had to stand still, and wait until Friday so that everyone could take the Math exam together. Exam sheets arrive in top-secret envelopes, held in high security fashion until the bell announces test time. Then the envelopes are all simultaneously opened ceremoniously by a student picked at random. Most of the time the student is too nervous and can’t tear the opaque black plastic, so the proctoring teacher has to mock him and take over. All teachers are required to wear their white coats and no one is absent. Cell phones are strictly prohibited to prevent students from texting for help, and to prevent teachers from texting answers. The cheating so endemic to Mozambican testing is strangely absent, our school hasn’t caught a single cheater in National Exams, and at least the two of us are actually looking. It would be difficult for even the most ambitious students to cram 3 years worth of material into a single crib sheet, and the stakes are so high, academic fraud during National Exams carries an automatic 2 year suspension from school. Also, there is no need to cheat during exams. Since the test is graded locally by the same teachers who have been teaching you over the past three years, it’s easier to convince one of them to grade your test favorably. All the tests are coded, so a student’s name never appears on their response sheet, but since they are coded in alphabetical order it doesn’t take a Rosetta Stone to figure out who is who. In fact every teacher carries a small sheet of paper with all his or her cousins’, nephews’, sister-in-laws’, or whoever’s secret codes on them and hovers around his colleague’s table to make sure they get a passing grade. So much wrangling goes on that the biology teachers, including Janet, who were still actually trying to grade had to leave the chop-shop and find somewhere quiet to work. People know we, as Americans, don’t condone this perversion of the academic system, so they get a kick out of being extra blatant in front of us. They mean it more of a joke but they don’t understand the degree of disdain we have for the corruption so damaging to the society. The final day we had to make public everyone’s results, which involved a complicated set of calculations. We have to average each student’s national test score with their high school grades, and then average all of those. No student can pass if their total average is less than 10 (everything here is out of 20), neither if any of their national exam scores is lower than 7 and no student can pass if they fail either Portuguese or Math. All the results had to be meticulously documented in a gigantic grid, in duplicate. Basically we set up a grading sweat shop with teachers clustered around the giant grids, with one teacher reading each name and test score, another calculating averages on a hand held calculator, and another two writing down the results; something excel could do with one click. It felt like a Victorian accounting firm from a Charles Dickens novel. It took 18 teachers six hours to do a job Janet and I could have done in an hour on the computer. It took all day and we had to work through lunch to finish the task, but it was our last official duty at the school, so it felt good to be done.