By Amoto Ndiewo
For the second year running, KCPE results will be out in a fortnight. The education CS Prof. George Magoha said the marking of scripts for the 1.2 million candidates commenced on the first day and will be released in two weeks’ time if not earlier.
The CS was speaking at Kamukunji Sub-county examination pick up point in Nairobi on the last day of the exams.
Sources at Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) have disclosed that the fast pace in which multiple choices marking is done has been occasioned by acquisition of Modern Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) electronically scoring on the exam manuscripts.
The OMR captures marked data from candidates’ answer sheets using specialised scanning. It is a dedicated scanning device that shines a beam of light on the exam sheet.
The KNEC source clarified that the contrasting reflection at the predetermined positions on the exam sheet is then used to detect marked areas as they reflect less light than the blank areas of the paper.
Earlier, KCPE examination results took longer due to manual verification of the results but with OMR, scripts are marked in batches of 100 and 200 sheets.
The old machines were reportedly two decades old and were nearly obsoleted and had high degree of areas which lowered efficiency and efficacy.
“Due to such reasons the KCPE results delayed thus taking long to compile, but this time round the results will be accurate and precise by reducing human interaction with candidates’ results,” said CS for Education.
The KNEC insiders say the new marking machine was also fine-tuned to speed up tallying of Kiswahili Insha and English Composition marks, something that was previously done manually by examiners. The two language papers are still marked manually by examiners but during tallying, OMR comes into play.
