Dubai: Recently, much to the surprise of KHDA officials, they received fab reviews about the performance of an average school from hundreds of parents. Dubious about the responses, officials decided to double check. All the responses not only were found to be sent from one single IP address, the timestamps showed that the responses were all emailed one after the other.
Narrating another incident, an inspector said she was a bit surprised when a high school student asked her to turn over the chair she was sitting and look. She found a sticker that read - “Rented for a day”.
Teachers know that classroom interaction is one of the important factors based on which the inspectors will judge them. To fake this, students are asked to raise their hands to all questions asked while the inspectors are present in class. Students who know the answer should raise their right hands and others the left so the teachers know whom to pick out to say the answer aloud.
Another common practice is to repeat a lesson they have already completed.
“Once we asked the students about what a particular teacher taught them the previous week and the students replied that she was new to the school. The same thing happened in few other classes. So we checked the documents and found that several of the teachers were just brought in to be at the school during the days of inspections. They were actually employed at a different school run by the same group,” an inspector shared.
“It is a recent trend to put up shows and performances by students in the name of entertaining inspectors. This evidently is done to keep us from doing our job,” added another inspector. “The only thing these schools succeed in doing is making a mockery of the education they offer their students and of the trust parents place in them.”
