Some stakeholders have taken issue with the fact that the number of candidates with the minimum university entry qualification of mean grade C+ and above is 70,073 ( 11.38 per cent) out of 611,952 who sat the KCSE exam.
The stakeholders have every right to take issue with the dismal performance. The 2017 performance, just like the 2016 one, is disquieting. The students who got C+ and above in the 2016 KCSE exam were 88,929, representing only 15.41 per cent out of 574,125 candidates.
This dismal showing is a legitimate cause of concern. It is regrettable, however, that some stakeholders are attributing this tragic state of affairs to “a fraud that condemned students to mass failure”. They see an alleged determination by the government to force more students to join tertiary institutions.
Nothing can be further from the truth. There is nothing sinister whatsoever in the quality and range of the results. The results are a true reflection of the quotient of energy and skill that have gone into curriculum management and delivery across the board. It is also a byproduct of honest and efficient administration of the exam.
The environment in which students prepare and sit the exam is designed to ensure that the integrity of the examining process is preserved. That the final exam is conducted efficiently, with absolute accuracy and rigour, and in a manner that provides a consistent and appropriate exam environment for all students.
The whole process is conducted by professional educators and under strict supervision. Aggregation of marks and other concomitant statistics are now electronically done, unlike in the past when some of the process was done manually.
For many years, the marking of the KCSE exam always ended by December 24, but the results were released mid or towards the end of February. It took almost three months to release the results—a period that was unnecessary and, by default, fraught with clear and present temptations.
What Kenyans now have therefore are authentic results reflecting the true efforts of the teaching and learning experience.
The purpose of an exam is to enable the policymakers to establish how well the students have been exposed to the knowledge, reasoning abilities, skills, attitudes and values that the curriculum embodies.
The examination results, whether they are internal or external, provide, among other functions, facts and figures that inform the kind of policy interventions needed to address the weaknesses revealed or reinforce the strengths.
Ideally, exam results provide an opportunity for self-questioning or introspection. It is an opportunity to ask ourselves whether we, as a nation, are doing justice to our children. Whether the learning experience we are exposing our children to is of such quality as to develop in them the innate range of intelligences or abilities they have. It is a time to measure our devotion to the needs and aspirations of the children, who guarantee the future of any nation.
It is a time for introspection for policymakers, educators, parents, political and opinion leaders. It is not a time for scapegoating. It is not a time for brickbats. The number of students who scored C+ and above oscillated around 30 per cent before 2016. This percentage plummeted that year to 15.41 per cent.
The Kenyan intelligentsia was apparently satisfied with the 30 per cent mark, but not the immediate former chairman of Knec, Prof Kabiru Kinyanjui. In his speeches during the release of the 2013 and 2014 KCSE exam results, Prof Kinyanjui challenged educational researchers to establish why there was a dismal performance.
It is not that KCSE candidates started failing yesterday. It is not that the bulk of the KCSE student body started having difficulties with understanding and manipulating the concepts, ideas, and skills the curriculum prescribes. The rain started beating them earlier than that.
The 30% of KCSE candidature who scored C+ and above happened when stakeholders raised pertinent questions about the integrity and credibility of examination process and the consequent authenticity of some results.
The reforms that the government is undertaking are aimed at addressing the weakness and shortcomings that undermine universal access to quality and relevant education by all learners across the breadth and length of this country.
The integrity and credibility in the administration of national examinations is one of the strategies or initiatives among many others geared to giving children, a teaching and learning experience fit for individual and national goals and aspirations.
The government wants to ensure that zero tolerance to cheating gives rise to effective and efficient curriculum management and delivery the result of which is acquisition of knowledge, skills, habits of thinking and values by learners.
The government is not perpetrating fraud on learners on the children and the nation. On the contrary, it is dismantling the fraud the country has been playing on the children by a process in UK and USA is called Grade Inflation.
The national discourse the examinations results should spawn is on how well and how many of our students are getting quality and functional exposure to the prescribed curriculum.
The discourse should also be about how the country can replicate the excellent examinations it is witnessing in some schools in the other schools whose performance in national examinations is grossly bad.
We have an unacceptably isolated number of schools that provided quality and rigorous educational experience to a small number of students while the rest are short-changing our children.
That is should form the DNA of our introspection on 2017 KCSE results. Brickbats and recriminations will help anybody. Least of all, the students we are ostensibly fighting for.