In praising Matiang’i, here's what we are not saying about Kenyan high school students

What you need to know:

  • My simple weighted average of all scores presented suggests to me that the average 16-year old in Kenya is firmly a D student.
  • There is no evidence in education studies that an arbitrary 10 per cent must attain the top grade for the examination itself to reflect the distribution of cognitive ability in a given class.
  • If indeed Kenyan youth are as cognitively challenged as these results show, then it is folly to continue to set examinations that measure for ability and skills that they are unlikely to attain.
  • It should not be a surprise that there is a strong incentive to cheat, because no student expects a D after four years of training.

The Cabinet secretary for Education announced the results of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Examination (KCSE) examination on Thursday.

With credit to the office, this year’s examinations appear to have been managed with a higher degree of integrity, suggesting that the results for each candidate reflect their fair performance.

And the minister reiterated his confidence that there was zero cheating despite the administration and rendering of the results in record time.

A lot of Kenyans justifiably think this kind of achievement is the highlight of public service, showing that with the right person and systems, it is possible to present efficient services and eliminate error and bias in examinations.

Nobody would argue with all the platitudes and the minister is entitled to bask in the glory of the examinations administered with uncharacteristic efficiency.

What is lost in the discourse of praise is that the results themselves show that the Kenyan high school student is hardly learning.

REASON TO WORRY

My simple weighted average of all scores presented suggests to me that the average 16-year-old in Kenya is firmly a D student.

The usual suspects and wailers on social media took the time to try to teach me some statistics, stating that cheating was so rampant that simple control of all cheating means that the results we are now seeing are the real state of affairs.

I really doubt this simplistic, if convenient answer.

There is no doubt that cheating was far more blatant in recent years, but I doubt that eliminating cheating alone explains the 2016 results.

These results should give us reason to worry as much as we were by the cheating that was recorded. I do not believe that these examinations measure cognitive capability, for a number of reasons.

First, if Kenya’s youth and most privileged generation since independence is only capable of an average grade of D, then we must ask tougher questions of ourselves. Is it conceivable that with all the teachers in Kenya and the public spending that a majority of young children in Kenya are barely literate and demonstrably innumerate?

'MACHO' VIEW

I am not sure that the answer is yes, because I do not think that the average youth that I meet is a dunce as the grade distribution suggests. Because, as the results show, four years of dedicated learning at the point at which the brains grows at its fastest rate should yield a grade curve much different from the one that I see.

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with an economist who suggested to me that there is a very big disconnect between the teaching in Kenya and the kind of examinations that students sit for.

In her view, Kenyan examinations are set with a “macho” view that examinations are supposed to be exhausting and result in very few passes while the quality of teaching doesn’t always match.

Hearing Fred Matiang’i state yesterday that only 10 per cent of students or fewer should ever attain the top grade in any subject reminded me of this discussion. In this view, every examination must result in a stratification of students between the smart and the not so smart by ensuring that top grades are attained by very few.

This is a convenient aphorism, but there is no evidence in education studies that an arbitrary 10 per cent must attain the top grade for the examination itself to reflect the distribution of cognitive ability in a given class.

POOR TRAINING

Thirdly, I am conscious of the irony that teachers who trained students for four years are designated as professional markers and suddenly find that those students are incapable of responding to the curriculum that they were being prepared for.

Shouldn’t these teachers be embarrassed that they are setting and grading examinations where the vast majority of test takers do not seem to be well prepared to sit the examinations?

The clearest conclusion we can draw from these results is that Kenyan high school students are subjected to very poor training and that is reflected in the results that we see.

My rough cut of the data presented by the minister shows me that the median grade was closer to grade D.

If indeed Kenyan youth are as cognitively challenged as these results show, then it is folly to continue to set examinations that measure ability and skills that they are unlikely to attain, because this state of affairs confirms the tension between teaching quality and examination that I argue above.

Thus the examination and the assumptions behind it have to change. Indeed, it should not be a surprise that there is a strong incentive to cheat, because no student expects a D after four years of training, and yet the examination as rendered give him no chance to attain a decent grade.

Kwame Owino is the chief executive officer of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA-Kenya), a public policy think tank based in Nairobi. Twitter: @IEAKwame