Let students be ranked more realistically

The media recently reported that the government had banned ranking of examination results.

The correct position is that the government has abolished the ranking of schools and candidates in examination performance.

The word “ban” implies that this was an unapproved activity, yet ranking of students and schools was carried out by the government and/or its agent, the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec).

The government cannot, therefore, stop itself from conducting an activity it was carrying out lawfully. The government may, for example, ban holiday tuition, since this is an activity it has been advising against for a long time.

Having addressed the trivial issue of semantics, I commend the Ministry of Education for finally making this important shift in examination policy. Ranking of schools and individuals in examination results was not only irrational and negative, but has been shrouded in secrecy and fallacy that at worst bordered on fraud.

That for decades, Knec annually released results in which a single candidate emerged number one among hundreds of thousands was questionable. That there rarely were ties in the top positions was even a bigger fallacy requiring public clarification or inquiry.

IMPOSSIBILITY

What Knec has been presenting for years in terms of examination ranking of students is a practical, if not statistical, impossibility, unless it conducted a raffle among the highest scored candidates to come up with a single top student.

A more credible ranking and grading system should produce several top students from different schools and different parts of the country. Such was the kind of ranking method used in the 1980s, when in the Class Seven Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) several candidates who scored three straight “A” grades with a maximum of 36 points were all ranked number one. Similarly in the Form Four examination, those who scored Division One of six points were all considered number one.

Ranking of schools and individual students not only suffers from credibility lapses, it has created cutthroat competition among schools with serious ramifications on the life of individual students and the society at large.

TEMPTATION TO CHEAT

These include the temptation to cheat in examinations so as to be ranked high and holiday drilling of children, producing a generation that viewed learning as punitive, not an enjoyable unravelling of knowledge and the environment. This system denied learners the joy and beauty of being children.

The now popular offshoot of this system, the prayer day that many schools now favour, has contributed to the pressure exerted on children, turning a simple test of understanding into a matter of life and death.

Now that ranking has been abolished, let examination grading revert to a system that is categorical and based on group performance so as to reflect reality. The truth of the matter is that if you conducted an examination among 700,000 candidates, there would be thousands of ties in the top position.

If, on the other hand, top students are ranked together as a division or simply “A” students, there would be consistency as the number one will almost always come from this cohort.

Dr Walter Odhiambo is a senior lecturer in oral and maxillofacial surgery at the University of Nairobi. ([email protected])