A three-year blacklisting and a criminal record await those who have been hired to write exams for their friends, the KwaZulu-Natal education department said on Monday.
The province’s senior exam manager, Barney Mthembu, said those pupils caught ”hiring” others to write their matric exams will be blacklisted from writing exams for the next three years.
”And those who are sitting and writing the exam for someone else would be arrested and charged with fraud,” he said.
As for those found with crib notes, Mthembu said their exam papers would be declared null and void.
Addressing journalists at a briefing in Durban, provincial education minister Ina Cronje said the department will be adopting a zero-tolerance approach to cheaters this year.
”We are not interested in cheats and we will take harsh sanctions on them,” she said.
Exam papers, she said, will be distributed to schools on the morning of the exams for security reasons.
”In the unlikely event that a paper is leaked, the department has back-up papers on hand.”
With three weeks to go before the examination, Cronje said the department will also have helicopters on stand-by to deliver papers if the need arose.
”This is applicable in areas where schools are situated in difficult terrains … The helicopters would be used if our vehicles are unable to get to the schools on the morning of the exam for whatever reason,” said Cronje.
She did not say how many choppers will be on stand-by.
The department said it has put other contingency plans in place in the event of floods, fires or power failures but did not elaborate.
Cronje said 152 341 matriculants will be sitting for the new curriculum exam, which starts on October 29 and ends on December 3. Marking will take place between December 3 and 10 at marking centres where 10 237 markers will be on hand. — Sapa