The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) has now raised serious questions on the mistakes that led to poor performance in the 2016 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams.
Through their Secretary General Wilson Sossion, KNUT claimed that the results were not in line with the normal curve that is to be expected in national examination results.
The teachers’ union has further claimed that the poor performance was as a result of failures at the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) that was in charge of the process.
Particularly, KNUT has stated that there were three critical mistakes that contributed to the low grades from candidates.
1. Poor Coordination in the Marking Scheme
KNUT has claimed that the marking scheme for the 2016 KCSE exam was arrived at without the involvement of the examiners.
The examiners were also not allowed to interact with the papers that they were marking as has been the tradition in the past.
2. Filling of Marks and Stray Scripts
The trasition has been that examiners are allowed to fill in the results in the sheets provided by KNEC.
However, as part of the reforms introduced by Education CS Fred Matiang'i, all the examination sheets were taken directly to KNEC where they were fed into the database.
The union also stated that they were unsure of the fate of stray scripts since tradition has been for examiners to go back in January to mark them.
3. Normalisation of Grades
Another change in the process was in the award ceremony where grades are normalised based on the performance across the country.
The normalisation is usually specific for a given subject but last year, no moderation was allowed and the grading system was common for all subjects.
This explains the many As in the humanities and only a few in English and sciences.
This mistake was blamed for the poor performance amongst boys compared to girls since most girl schools don’t take the three sciences.
In light of the anomalies, KNUT has proposed that the KCSE results be cancelled and moderation allowed.
