Kenya National Examination Council (Knec) is reviewing queries from parents and candidates on recently released Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results.
In a report presented to the National Assembly’s Education Committee, the Ministry of Education said the review of the queries involves the verification of the score in the database and the candidate’s answer scripts.
“Knec has a procedure for resolution of results queries as guided by the Legal Notice No. 131 of the Knec (Marking of Examinations, Release of Results and Certification) Rules of 2015,” the ministry said.
The 2023 KCPE examination results were made available to the candidates on the Knec portal for schools to access.
To facilitate the ease of accessing candidate results, Knec engaged an SMS service provider to provide optional access to the results through an SMS platform.
The ministry acknowledged experiencing challenges transmitting results through SMS.
It said some grades missed the quality grades signs of plus (+) and minus (-) as expected.
“For, instance, some candidates would receive an SMS of a mark of 73B+ while others with the same score indicated 73B, while some had 75A instead of the correct grade is 75A-,” the ministry explained.
It added that the results for the Kiswahili paper for some candidates were presented for Kenyan Sign Language.
The ministry further added that the SMS service provider identified the issues of results data truncation and encoding that affected the accurate and complete representation of the characters in the SMS text.
“The issues were rectified in about 10 minutes and the results sent through SMS after the correction were indicating the correct grade and in expected format,” the ministry said.
A total of 1,415,315 candidates were registered in 28,533 examination centres.
The 2023 KCPE examination was administered from October 30 to November 1, 2023.
The ministry added that the processing of the 2023 KCPE examination results was not rushed in any way and was undertaken as per the KNEC processing timelines.
“The processing of 2023 KCPE examination results took the longest number of days in the last eight-year period,” the ministry added.
The processing commenced immediately after the end of the administration of the KCPE examination on November 1, 2023, and was completed on November 18, 2023.
