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Makale Özeti:
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An examination is an important component of any institution that educates people. It is
a form of assessment used to measure the students’ understanding of the concepts and
principles they would have learnt. Zimbabwe Open University, an Open and Distance
Learning institution has been setting its own examinations for the academic programmes
offered. Through examinations, ZOU students are encouraged to take an active role in
analysing and questioning the things they would have learnt. This paper discusses the
examinations management at ZOU with a special focus on the setting, administering,
marking right up to the publication of results. It will also discuss the challenges that ZOU
is facing in conducting examinations. It will finally emerge with some valuable practical
suggestions on how ZOU can improve on its examination management and thereby
achieve quality assurance in all its programmes. The investigation adopted the
qualitative methodology and a case study design to generate data to address the
questions which guided the study.
The purposively sampled sample was drawn from ZOU’s National Centre, Bulawayo and
Matabeleland North Regions. The sample consisted of manager -examinations, managerquality
control, chairpersons of departments from different faculties, programme leaders,
programme coordinators, regional quality coordinators, regional administrators, and
students who were in their second year of study. Face-to-face interviews were used to
generate data from manager -examinations, manager- quality control, regional quality
coordinators and regional administrators. Data from chairpersons of departments from
different faculties, programme leaders, programme coordinators, second year students
were generated through focus group discussions.
Major findings were the management of examinations at ZOU enhances quality
assurance, cited activities which contributed to quality assurance included setting of
examination items for the item banks, tight security in the transporting of examination
items to and from the regions, residential marking, active invigilation.
Participants were aware of activities that compromised quality assurance such as
uncommitted invigilators, incomplete examination, lack of clarity on instructions, lack of
security and non-confidentiality of examination items, timetable alterations. Some of the
challenges that were mentioned by participants were unrealistic deadlines set by
academic registry regarding marking, delays in dispatching of Personal Identification Numbers to newly admitted students, welfare of invigilators during invigilation, and the
need for communication between invigilators and other relevant authorities if the need
arise when the examination is in progress. Some of the recommendations arrived at were
that faculties should hold periodic workshops on examination management, induction of
new staff members who deal with examination management, adopting ICT in the
dispatch of examinations to regional centres and networking of the National Centre and
the regional centres to facilitate communication and generation of student Personal
Identification Numbers.
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