New KNEC Grading System Will Include Math, English, and Kiswahili

The marking of Form Four national assessments is set to change significantly, giving millions of students under 8-4-4 a better chance of improving their final marks.

President William Ruto welcomed new recommendations for changing the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) during his meeting with the education reform committee.

The Presidential Working Party on Education Reform recommends that KCSE grading use two obligatory subjects to determine the learners’ final grades.

Mathematics and one foreign language (Kiswahili or English) will be required.

The candidate’s final score will be calculated by adding these two subjects to his or her top five performing subjects.

Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) presently grades applicants based on the five necessary topics and two other best-performing subjects.

The Knec considers a candidate’s performance in two sciences (Biology, Chemistry, or Physics) as well as two languages (English or Kiswahili). Math is a compulsory course.

The final two subjects are drawn from humanities and arts courses, as well as technical subjects such as agriculture, business studies, geography, history, and business education, as well as religious education.

In its suggestions, the reforms team advised that you “Develop guidelines for computing the KCSE mean score (based on English/Kiswahili, Math, and five other best subjects)”.

According to the team’s recommendation, the changes should be implemented within a year. Candidates for 2023 will thus be the first to benefit from the new idea, should they are affected.

According to President William Ruto, who made the discovery on Wednesday, nearly 5,000 of the country’s 11,000 secondary schools do not send even one student to college, with majority of them located in remote areas.

“That is cause for us to pause and reflect on our lives.” Many of the students who attend our universities are either graduates of elite schools or the children of wealthy folks who can afford a certain degree of education. Kenya cannot continue in this manner, he stated; we must reconsider.

President Ruto addressed during the launch of the Open University of Kenya at Konza Technopolis City.

The proposals were supported by KNEC’s chief executive officer, David Njengere, who said that the current grading system had destroyed the ambitions of many graduates.

According to Dr. Njengere, the changes will prohibit pupils in the last five classes of the eight-four-four system from rescuing their ambitions.

The 8-4-4 educational system is now employed in five courses throughout the country. The KCPE exam will be taken this year by the final generation, who will begin secondary school in 2024 and graduate in 2027.

The Presidential working group’s approach, according to Dr. Njengere, will modify the grading system to take students’ professional interests into account.

The difficulty with what we’ve been doing with 8-4-4 is that it is a very narrow and rigid curriculum that, at the age of leaving, demands every child, regardless of skill, to be tested on the same themes, which forms part of their final grade. “It’s a full range of heavy lifting for any child,” said Njengere.

Njengere believes that understanding the issue requires a detailed examination of the KCSE’s design. He mentioned that the test was designed to serve two functions.

According to Dr. Njengere, the first stage is to analyze pupils’ achievement throughout the period of four years in secondary school. The second component, he continued, is that it acts as a transition marker, determining whether the student proceeds to college or university.

According to Dr. Njengere, the latter has been a pain in the flesh of many Form Four leavers because the grading system has diluted their total success.

He claims that the ripple effect stops thousands of people from continuing their education after high school.

According to Njengere, the tremendous rivalry in the final exam has transformed KCSE to an examination that determines where the student goes while ignoring the assessment goal.

“The curriculum demands are not supposed to inhibit you in any way from transitioning because you must transition in life, whether because of age or achievement,” Dr. Njengere said on Wednesday.

He used the example of a candidate interested in the social sciences having to deal with two science subjects that they must pass because failing those two lowers the final score and may prevent them from enrolling in their preferred course.

“So, no matter how good I am in my humanities and languages, these three will drag me down, and I will end up with a mean score that would give me an aggregate of a C or something, not because I am stupid, but because the system’s demands,” Dr. Njengere continued.

“We are punishing the students,” he continued. For example, we might tell a student who excels in science, “You must pass in English, you must pass in humanities, and so on; the kid can’t do that, so we are wasting the system.”

The similar problem exists for students who choose science but are required to take English, literature, Kiswahili, and Fasihi lessons.

The Presidential Working Party is essentially questioning if it is necessary for some topics to hold you back after you graduate from secondary school if you want to pursue a specific professional route that does not necessitate passing at a very high level in all of these subjects.

Dr. Njengere believes that all courses are crucial, even for children whose future occupations do not rely on core skills like as literacy and numeracy.

He contends, however, that there must be a clear line between acquiring this fundamental knowledge and evaluating students when they sit for KCSE exams.

“We will evaluate you based on achievement,” he continued, because you need some basic literacy and numeracy skills. Kenya was ranked lower than other countries under the present grading system.

According to data from the East African region, Kenya gets the fewest high grades, also known as distinctions—that is, Grade A and A- (minus)—in the final national examination.

Kenya, on the other hand, had its result fall to 0.85 percent. In Uganda and Tanzania, only 7,553 candidates received an A or A- (minus), which is comparable to a distinction.

“At this point, you begin to convince yourself that the problem may not be the students, but rather the system we use to grade our children.” “Perhaps we’re using a system that’s a little too punitive for them, and we’re not distancing achievement from placement,” observed Dr. Njengere.

Another comparison of final secondary school exam results between the 8-4-4 education system and the previous education system, the 7-4-2-3 education system:

marking of Form Four national assessments is set to change significantly, giving millions

According to the data, 3,509 applicants (or 3.21 percent of those who took the examinations) obtained Division 1, the highest mark at O-levels between 1983 and 1986.

However, after the 8-4-4 was imposed, the numbers dropped substantially.

In 1989, for example, only one student out of 130,639 took the KCSE and achieved an A. There were 131,932 candidates the next year, but none received an A. There were 166,712 candidates in 1991, with only two obtaining an A.

Even with the implications of exam cheating and malpractice that raged previous to the 2016 revisions, Knec data shows that the best results were in 2014, yet even then, just 0.635 percent of total applicants received an A.

He stated that if there was widespread cheating, “let’s say we couldn’t get even one percent of the entire candidate population to get the highest grade.”

marking of Form Four national assessments is set to change significantly, giving millions

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