For those who passed through University of Nairobi and registered at the department of Political Science, you must know Prof. Phillip Nying'uro.

For those who don't, Nying'uro is a proud lecturer there who will not be coy about informing you that he has a PhD and has been studying for several years. He will also tell you that in his time at university, they would study very hard but still suffer through supplementary exams (resits).

While at it, he may go into a lament about the Parallel study Programme, complaining that it has produced still-born students who do not study, who show an over-reliance on notes, are in a hurry to finish their courses and surprisingly, do not get to sit any supplementaries. He will complain that students rush to the sociology and communication departments because they get to harvest easy As.

Needless to say, the Professor is not the most popular man in Nairobi, and ad hominem would quickly bury the words coming out of his mouth. A sober evaluation of his jeremiad however, reveals that it carries much truth and that his concerns need to be addressed urgently. Not one of the students I talked to disputed his arguments about the amount of time spent studying in the library, or the fact that the departments in question awarded "good or better grades."

Then there's the exams themselves.

A friend of mine found herself subjected to the giggly immaturity of a bunch of girls when she reported to the invigilator that they were cheating, and in the process watering down her grades. The girls were pointing at her, laughing as they found her hostile to their good grades. They were part ot a group of students who were busily turning pages and asking each other in loud whispers "ni hii? Apana sio hiyo,". They were so badly prepared for the exam that they did not even understand the notes they were copying from.

Even so, and wrong as the students' behaviour was, it is the University administration that must shoulder the blame for the indisciplined conduct of exams. There were about 80 students crammed into the stuffy Science 1 lab. It was so squeezed that the students could easily read each other's answer sheets. The invigilator kept walking in and out of the exam room as the roomful of students decided their destinies, with those who were cheating raising the lowest denominator and making it much harder to attain top grades.

You would be shocked that in most cases, the students who carry "mwakenya" to the examination room are not the older working students. In most cases they are the young 19, 20-year-olds, who are dropped at school by their parents at 8 am and leave for home at night. One has to wonder then, why it is they cheat seeing as they have all the time in the world to study. The answer is simple, they have not a clue what they are doing at the university. There are those, it is true who are so determined they could cram whole books into their minds and reproduce them if need be; but the majority are truly out of place at the university.

One girl, renowned for her cheating, wondered why anyone would have a problem with what she did. "Kama mtu hataki ku-dub si akae," she said. You may ask the same question, maybe even point to carry-home tests and open-book exams that some universities in the west have regularly. In my opinion, I think the parallel program is a good idea, and I am not saying that regular students don't cheat, they do; but the practice is nowhere so rife as in the parallel programme which is as a result putting out to market largely unqualified graduates with little idea what their degree was all about.

The University regularly suspends students guilty of examination irregularities, but this discipline must be used in accompaniment with other measures lthat ensure examination environments are properly policed and as far as is possible, cheat-free . More than that, I think the parallel programme should have an age limit, admitting only students who are beyond 25 and who can conduct themselves with a level of maturity.