[kictanet] KCSE

Thu Apr 10 23:24:11 EAT 2008

Dr Ndemo et others

  All it takes for a to a program to fuction properly whereas it could be having bugs or mistakes or ommissions in what it is executing or eventually produces could be a comma, fullstop or other parameters of which the system or the program recognizes as valid. This is not new thing world over and programmers will agree with me on this unless otherwise ( politiking, unrealism etc).

  I guess the key thing is controls in this case, be they automated or manual. And other than much fuss on the issue, the examination board should be guided by the appropriate authorites and experts on essence of controls which could either be detective, preventive etc...Walu can elaborate further and the issue comes to a rest in future.

  If anything, i have heard of employees or even suppliers getting double pay out of a similar program issue in top notch organizations but the incidences are always maanged and reversed and at the same time lessons are learned and workaround or solutions for future incidences mitigation or solving can be documented. The cause of the whole saga could be neglect, sabottage, fraud, or even an attach to the system and  all those can be classified as computer related error without having to go into FBI investigative issues nity grities.

  Let us give the examination council  a chance in future and peace of mind and at the same time the concerned to help them come up with robust systems which serves all sitting candindates in any exam fairly and proffessionally. It is  true that  the affected were traumatized by the incidence but i guess it has been addressed.

  My advice: Controls...Controls , thats why best practices dictates having test environments before anything is moved to live environment..Broadcasting was just by passing the test enviroment . Who knows ,may be the test environment lacked controls hence this couldn't be detected.

  My thoughts....

  Regards

bitange at jambo.co.ke wrote:
  Dear All,
My earlier e-mail to Aduda has elisted direct questions as to how the
programing error could have occured. Usually errors such as the one
explained by the Minister occur during Data Mining.

Researchers generally define data mining (sometimes called data or
knowledge discovery) as the process of analyzing data from different
perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that
can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software
is one of a number of analytical tools for analyzing data. It allows users
to analyze data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it,
and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is
the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in
large relational databases like KCSE.

Data does not automatically become information unless it is mined properly.

Ndemo

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