Wasanga: Standard 8 exam results to be released by Jan 31

As schools open on Monday for the first term, candidates who sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination last year will have to wait until the end of the month to know their results.

More than 100 senior examiners of the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) are processing marked scripts after a three-week delay caused by the teachers’ strike that triggered a series of changes in the examination schedule.

The KCPE results, which are traditionally released on December 28, will be announced by January 31. Knec officials started processing the results after the manual marking of scripts by 7,600 teachers on December 28.

“Normally, after the teachers mark the scripts, it takes a minimum of a month by the council to process the entire results,” Knec Secretary Paul Wasanga told the Sunday Nation.

“Because we must account for each score of a candidate correctly, it is a process that needs ample time to ensure that there is no room for mistakes.”

Although most scripts of the five subjects tested are marked by a computer-aided machine, Mr Wasanga said his officers painstakingly go through the scripts again to ensure the correct scores were awarded.

This, he said, was because many candidates do not follow the instructions during the exam, making errors that the optical readers used to mark scripts do not recognise.

“In many cases, candidates shade the eclipse with the correct answer lightly making it difficult for the machine to recognise the answers,” he said.

In other cases, candidates mark two answers in the same question, making it impossible for the optical readers to accurately offer a score. There is only one correct answer for each question.

“These scripts must, therefore, be re-checked manually, alongside those of the candidates who keyed in wrong index numbers during the exam,” Mr Wasanga said.

But it does not end there. When the correct scores have been ascertained, the examiners will then embark on keying in the results of the more than 800,000 candidates who wrote the exam between December 4 and 6.

A spreadsheet of what he referred to as “dummy” results is then produced indicating what each of the candidates scored in each subject and the total score.

“A quality assurance team is then called in at this stage to check the entire results, irregularities encountered during the processing and the nature of the scores in each of the subjects,” Mr Wasanga added.

The team embarks on a fairly technical procedure called “standardisation” or “normalisation” of the results which involves ensuring that the grades in each subject have the same value across the spreadsheet.

Here, the value of grade A, for instance in English, must correspond to that of the scores in a mathematics paper.

However, performance in each of these subjects is not similar. Candidates score better in some subjects depending on the level of the difficulty of the exam.

“We, therefore, establish a range where an A will be scored in each of the subjects and similarly the lowest score across the range,” Mr Wasanga said.

This is to mean that, even after the results have been “normalised”, top scorers will still remain on top across the spreadsheet.

Another spreadsheet referred to as “exemption results” is then produced and another group of quality assurance examiners come in to polish the results.

As KCPE is a norm-referenced exam – an exam that ranks candidates according to their scores – the final team lists the pupils in order of their performance in the total scores column of each subject. After that the results are released.

“What people must understand is that each of these stages cannot be overlooked because we produce results whose integrity is beyond reproach,” Mr Wasanga said.

Mr Wasanga has asked lobbies, including teachers and parents’ unions, that are pushing for the release of the results prematurely, to let Knec finish its job.