By Amoto Ndiewo
The marking of KCPE has been completed in four centres.
According to Education CS Prof George Magoha, the centres are Kiambu, Nairobi, Eastern and Western counties.
‘’Though complete in those centres, the process is going on well in the remaining counties and will be finished in a fortnight,’’ the CS said.
This will be the second year running that KCPE results will be released within two weeks of completion.
KNEC sources say the acquisition of modern Optical Marking Recognition (OMR) system has simplified the process since it electronically scores the multiple choice papers.
This is unlike the obsolete old technology, which took many more hours as they marked one script at a time. The modern machine loads in batches of 100 and 200.
“This OMR system is accurate and precise, unlike the olden machine which was prone to errors and reduced efficiency in marking and releasing results,’’ he said.
KNEC insiders say the OMR system has been fine tuned to speed up tallying of English composition and Kiswahili Insha previously done manually by examiners.
The two national language composition papers are graded by hand. However, physical counts are no longer used to compute grades. The marked scripts are scanned by OMR to verify the marks in record time.
In addition to reducing cheating, the new system has improved efficiency. It is one of several security measures taken to improve accuracy and credibility of the KCPE results.
