MPs take Education CS Amina to task on exam marking report

Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed. A parliamentary committee Monday tore into a report she presented explaining how last year’s KCSE examination, in which thousands of students failed, was marked. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • In her presentation, the minister said the marking was done through a conveyor belt system.

  • Ms Mohamed said the marking was undertaken according to internationally-accepted standards.
  • The marking has been roundly criticised by stakeholders in the education sector.

A parliamentary committee Monday tore into a report explaining how last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination, in which thousands of students failed, was marked.

Members of the Education Committee in the National Assembly described the report tabled by Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed as misleading and asked the ministry to ensure the marking is done in a way prescribed by international standards.

In her presentation, the minister said the marking was done through a conveyor belt system (CBS) in which each answer to a question was marked by a different examiner in a group.

“This aimed at eliminating subjectivity, personal biases and hence a candidate’s score was not determined entirely by one sole examiner,” reads the report tabled at the meeting that was chaired by Tinderet MP Julius Melly on Thursday.

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS

Ms Mohamed said the marking, which has been roundly criticised by stakeholders in the education sector, was undertaken according to internationally-accepted standards.

The Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) put in place an elaborate strategy that ensured marking ended on December 18 and results released on December 24, she said.

Knec also installed a secure virtual private network, connecting all marking centres to the central server on real-time basis.

“This was a shift from the previous years when separate networks in each and every marking centre were used to capture marks and backed up in external hard disks,” said the CS.

The report also adds that Knec increased the number of data captures (that record candidates score from marks sheets filled by examiners to the knec servers) from 215 to 262 in 2017.

NOT SATISFIED

But the MPs were openly not satisfied with the report.

Migori Woman Representative, Dr Pamela Odhiambo, asked the CS to evaluate the marking and moderation systems, saying the ultimate goal of any education system was not to produce failures.

Kiminini MP Chris Wamalwa also raised concerns, saying the 2017 KCSE exam results do not reflect the performance of students.

“You have cleverly come here with an analysis of performance for the last two years (2016 and 2017). Any serious analysis would involve a look at performance trend for the last 5 years. You have also reported that there was an improvement of 0.1 which is very insignificant,” Mr Wamalwa told the CS.

Prof Margaret Kamar, the Uasin Gishu Senator, sought an explanation on how students who sat for KCSE before 2016 were performing in public universities, saying they could not all be condemned as exam cheats.

Only 69,151 out 611,952 candidates who took the exam qualified to join university after attaining the minimum entry point of C+.