All KCPE exam candidates to join high school, Uhuru says

Candidates who sat this year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination are likely to get their results this week, it has emerged.

This follows an announcement on Sunday by President Uhuru Kenyatta that marking of the papers is complete.

The President spoke in Gachororo village in Juja, Kiambu County where he attended church service and presided over a fundraising at the Presbyterian Church of East Africa.

He said very few cases of cheating and other malpractices were witnessed this year.

“I thank the parents, teachers and candidates. We want to congratulate those who made the examinations a success,” Mr Kenyatta said.

ADMISSION LETTERS

He added that the candidates will be given a chance to join secondary school, irrespective of their scores.

They will receive admission letters to secondary school before Christmas, he said.

“We know that you did your best. Do not worry even if you get a poor grade because we are going to ensure that you all get a chance join Form One,” Mr Kenyatta said.

He added, “And according to our (government’s) plans, we want all the candidates, before Christmas holiday, to have received their respective letters [of] admission.”

VOCATIONAL TRAINING

The Head of State asked parents to ensure that all candidates are admitted to Form One, adding that even if they do not get grades that will earn them ad-mission to universities, they will join technical and vocational education and training colleges for skills-based training.

This year, a total of 1,060,703 sat the KCPE exam. Of these, a total 2,481 were candidates with special needs.

Among them, 531,548 were boys while the rest were girls. There were 27,161 exam centres.

The exams began in October 30 and ended in November 1, 2018.

MARKING

Before the exams began, Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) Chairman George Magoha had announced that, the marking of exams would take approximately three weeks.

Dr Magoha had said that Knec would use 20 machines it acquired last year to mark the exams.

The optical mark recognition (OMR) machines enable the examiners to scan exam papers with multiple choice answers and can handle up to 10,000 papers daily.

PROGRAMMED

They are programmed with the correct answers and detect the pencil shade on the answer sheets.

Since last year, only the English composition and the Kiswahili Insha are marked manually.

After marking, the examiners are expected to pass the marked scripts to a new machine for the tallying of marks.

Last year, the machines were said to be 99.9 percent efficient.

The 2017 KCPE exam results were released on November 21.

According to the Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed, there was no exam leakage this year.

But this year saw the highest number of pregnant schoolgirls sitting the KCPE exam across the country.

Ms Mohamed has since ordered the quality assurance team in the ministry to investigate the rising teenage pregnancy cases and file a report.