The 2023 Form Four exam results will be announced in the second week of January, Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu has said.
Mr Machogu said the 903,260 candidates who sat for their final secondary school education test in November 2023 will know their fate in mid-January as their 1.4 million Standard Eight counterparts will be joining secondary schools.
According to the 2024 education calendar, Form One students will report to their new centres of learning on January 15, 2024.
“We are done with the marking. What we are currently doing is compiling the marks, verification and validation. You know it’s quite a process. So that by the end of the day, we release credible results,” said Machogu in an exclusive interview with the Nation.
The 903,260 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) candidates, he said, would benefit from a new grading system aimed at increasing the number of students joining universities.
The grading system recommended by the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms reduces the number of compulsory subjects and focuses on those that candidates are strong in.
The students will be graded on their performance in two compulsory subjects, that is, Mathematics and any language including English, Kiswahili, or Kenya Sign Language.
This is a departure from the current system in which students are graded on seven subjects (English, Mathematics, Kiswahili, two sciences and two others).
This will result in more students achieving better overall scores to qualify for post-secondary education.
The Kenya National Examination Council (Knec) has done away with the previous system where five subjects were mandatory, a method expected to increase the number of candidates qualifying for their upper education.
“Even the entry grade for University Education, the numbers will increase because last year we had 173,000 Kenyans out of 887,000 getting C+ and above, that is university entry which is 19 per cent. Regionally, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania, the percentage of people going to university is about 30 per cent,” Mr Machogu explained.
The CS said he is worried that in last year’s results, almost 40 per cent of candidates, more than 354,000, scored Grades D, D- and E.
Mr Machogu said the reforms team found that the current system is disadvantageous to some learners whose best subjects are not taken into account if they are not within the cluster.
“Previously, compulsory subjects included Mathematics, English Language, Kiswahili and two sciences. But this time round, we will only have two compulsory subjects, that is Mathematics and English Language, Kiswahili or Kenya Sign Language. We are doing this to allow learners to explore subjects they are good at,” he explained.
He said learners are gifted differently, with some good in either Social Sciences, Arts and Sports, and Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
However, the CS said thanks to the Competency-Based Curriculum, learners will have three pathways to pursue in Senior School including Social Sciences, Arts and Sports, and Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The CS assured Kenyans that the KCSE results will be credible.
This is partly because the government changed the mode of collection of national examination papers administered to the 2023 KCSE candidates.
Centre managers and exam supervisors picked up the exams twice daily from the examination containers, a departure from before when the papers were collected once a day and stored in the office leading to early exposure.
Other measures taken were remapping schools to facilitate easier access to the nearest storage container, which were increased by 82 bringing the total to 576, allowing only secondary school teachers to invigilate, supervise and examine the tests.
“This time round we did something which has never been done. In the afternoon paper, where we used to have major issues, we made sure it was picked up separately from the morning exam. However, it came with additional expenses,” said Mr Machogu.
However, the CS said the new guidelines paid off through curbing cheating. He expressed confidence that the exams were also marked fairly.
“We increased the number of marking centres from 35 to 40 such that the working conditions were better than before,” he added.
The ministry also increased the number of examiners for each subject to ensure they do not start marking at 4am. He said the examiners were also told to be flexible and relaxed during the exercise.
Mr Machogu said his ministry ensured the examiners were paid on time after the government released Sh1 billion.
