Education Minister Joseph Nsengimana has announced that changes will be made to how personnel administering national examinations are managed at examination centres. The measures are intended to eliminate cheating, students copying from one another and people helping students cheat, problems reported during the 2025/26 national examinations.
The announcement followed the Ministry of Education’s decision to allow 7,188 students found to have cheated in the Primary Leaving Examinations to resit the examinations.
Dr Nsengimana said an investigation into the matter established that the main problem occurred during the administration of the examinations at the centres where they were held.
“We found no problem in how the examinations were prepared, printed, transported to the examination centres or stored. The problem occurred on the actual examination day, after the examination papers had reached the examination room,” he said.
The Education Minister said greater attention would now be given to examination rooms to eliminate cheating completely. He warned that failure to address the problem could undermine education quality despite the Rwandan government’s efforts to improve it.
“Instead of finding only one person in the examination room, there will be two people from different schools to prevent this from happening again,” he said.
Nsengimana added that everyone involved in the process of delivering national examinations to examination centres would be more closely monitored. This includes employees of the National Examination and School Inspection Authority, district education officials and teachers.
“Practices like these prevent us from achieving the results we expect from the measures taken to improve quality. We must take action and fight them because effort that should be invested in teaching and learning is instead diverted to such activities,” he said.
Minister Nsengimana also said that, besides the students permitted to resit the national examinations, some education officials were suspected of participating in the malpractice.
Investigations into the first suspects have already begun, and some are being questioned by the relevant justice authorities.
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