Kenya National Examination Council has today Wednesday 11th January 2023 retired all CRE Paper one examiners with immediate effect. Those who had returned to continue marking have been ordered to leave St Francis Mang’u Girls High School.
Efforts to restore calmness yesterday (Tuesday) bore no fruits. The centre hosted about 1,000 examiners.
The decision to send them home was made following a meeting between the Ministry of Education, the Teachers Service Commission and the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC).
The aggrieved examiners cited intimidation, dictatorial leadership by the centre manager, poor pay, and the introduction of punitive examination marking policies.
“Examiners marking the CRE papers must be paid like other assessors. We cannot accept Ksh55 per paper marked when our colleagues marking other subjects are taking home Ksh78 for the same job,” an examiner said.
Their protest is also centered on meager pay, which is rated per script marked as opposed to assessors evaluating other subjects such as Kiswahili.
According to them, CRE examiners are only paid KES 55 per paper marked, whereas assessors in other subjects are paid KES 78 per script marked.
The markers also took issue with their bosses during the marking exercise, claiming that they had been waking up at 5 a.m. and going to bed after 10 p.m.
As a result of the long hours, the examiners expressed regret that they were unable to make a fair judgment and may have underperformed.
Furthermore, the examiners complained about having their phones and laptops confiscated from the marking area.
By the time of publishing this story, teachers were leaving the centre one by one while all unauthorized persons were chased away from the centre.