By Roy Hezron
Education Cabinet Secretary Prof. George Magoha is assuring that candidates are ready for the forthcoming national exams, dismissing report by Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) that doubted the readiness of 2021 candidates.
The report raised concerns over the preparedness of a majority of Class Eight examination candidates whose learning was disrupted by a 9 month-forced break due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking at Mukuru Kwa Njenga Primary School on February 3, 2021, Prof. Magoha exhibited a lot of confidence that the candidates will perform dismissing fears of unpreparedness.
“You would’ve contextualized this report in such a manner that it was done more than 12 weeks ago, since then the learners have been in school and they’re going to be there for another 6 weeks before they have exams. What the hell do you think you’re doing by killing their spirits, why contextualize this to say that this test was done yesterday and these excellent kids are going to fail the exams? They are not going to fail as widely circulated by the media,” Magoha said.
The CS clarified that the assessment by KNEC was only meant to establish the impact of the long Covid-19 school closure on the learners, adding that KNEC only played the role of providing the assessment items and processing the national report.
“Two weeks after reopening of schools for Grade 4 and Standard 8 learners in October 2020, the Ministry of Education, through the Kenya National Examinations Council, conducted a school based assessment to establish the learning loss occasioned by the long schools closure due to Coronavirus Pandemic,” said Magoha.
He continued, “This was a school-based assessment that was administered and scored by teachers and learners given feedback immediately. The role of KNEC was only to provide the assessment items and process the national report, which has widely been disseminated in the media today. Assessment results for each individual school were disseminated directly from November, 2020 and have been the basis of specific learning interventions mounted by teachers.”
According to the CS, teachers were already intervening to yield good results in the forthcoming national examinations, despite the mass failure of the candidates in the KNEC assessment.
“Considering that Standard 8 and Grade 4 learners have been in school for more than 14 weeks since that time, I am confident that the learning interventions by teachers have helped to recover the loss detected through the assessments. I am confident the results of the KCPE will reflect much improved performance of the learners,” stated Magoha.
The report indicated that majority of the KCPE candidates failed to attain the minimum pass mark of 50 percent with mathematics and languages recoding the lowest results while in sign language Composition, Mathematics, KSL (Language) English Composition and Kiswahili Composition (Insha) only 25.94%, 34.54%, 36.18%, 39.90%, and 45.19% of the learners respectively attained the minimum proficiency level.
The candidates also performed poorly in essay-based quizzes as opposed to multiple-choice questions, and in Mathematics, most of them were not competent in ratios, percentages, averages and measurements.
In term of gender, girls outperformed the boys in languages scoring an average of 48.965 percent against 46.08. However, boys outperformed in sciences and mathematics.
The KNEC report had suggested that 18 out of the 47 counties had mean scores above 50.0, with Nairobi recording the highest mean score at 59.20%, followed by Garissa and Mandera at 56.34 and 55.11% respectively.
The lowest mean scores were observed in Turkana (44.34%), Tana River (44.37%), and Samburu (44.51%). 263, 480 candidates performed dismally with under 200 marks out of a possible 500 in 2019
More than half of the total candidates scored below the average mark of 250, suggesting that a large number of pupils posted between average and below average performance in 2019.
About 1.1 million candidates are expected to sit KCPE examination, beginning March 22 and ending March 24.
