Exploring the Reintroduction of Malawi's JCE Exam during the Pandemic

• In Event: Post-COVID High-Stakes Exams in Comparative Perspective: Youth Experiences in Marginalized Secondary Schools in Colombia, India, and Malawi

Proposal

A decade ago, the Malawian government decided to cancel the Junior Certificate (Form 2) Exam because it cost too much for the government and individual students. In the midst of the pandemic, the government reintroduced the exam. The reason given for its reintroduction was that students had become “lazy” with its absence. This policy change received widespread support from teachers, parents, and students–despite the fact that the costs of the exam drove many students out of secondary school, and despite the fact that most students in public Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs), which serve the majority of Malawian secondary students, had very few chances to study during the pandemic.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in one rural CDSS in Thyolo district and one urban CDSS in Blantyre district, this paper explores how students, teachers, parents, policymakers and the media explained the reintroduction of the JCE and its consequences on the educational experiences and opportunities of students attending schools and living in communities marginalized by poverty, geography, and educational resource constraints. The paper examines the widespread narratives of holding students accountable for not being “lazy” during the pandemic alongside narratives and observations of the changes occurring in students’ and their families’ lives during the pandemic. These included significant declines in financial and food resources, changes in sexual and romantic relationships among youth that threatened their continued educational access, the full absence of schools and teachers in youth lives for a prolonged period of time (based in part on the failure of “new” and “old” technologies to bridge the instructional gap for economically and geographically marginalized youth), and radical declines in youth access to medical care and services–particularly important for HIV-positive youth and sexually active or pregnant youth.

The presentation documents and analyzes the consequences on youth wellbeing and educational retention of the classed and gendered inequities that were widened by the pandemic and the reintroduction of the JCE, the changes to school policies and practices that were enacted to refocus notions of accountability on the JCE (and away from other previous measures of learning enacted over the last decade), and changes to national policies that had the consequence of providing (largely) wealthier students with opportunities to move to better public schools in Form 3 when their (largely) less wealthy peers failed the JCE, or failed to pay for the JCE. The presentation concludes with a broad analysis of the consequences of exam-centered accountability tropes on secondary education equity and students’ wellbeing in Malawi.

Authors

• Stella Brenda Makhuva, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Thomas Chimwaza, CRECCOM

• Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison