CS Magoha: Ignore KNEC Assessment Report, Class 8 Are Ready

Cabinet Secretary for Education George Magoha has revealed that teachers have prepared candidates and they are now prepared to tackle the KCPE and KCSE examinations that are set to be done a short time from now.

On Wednesday, CS Magoha said that reports of KNEC’s assessments indicating that the candidates are not well-prepared are not accurate as they are of a time that is 12 weeks ago.

He said that since that time, he believes that candidates have improved in performance.

Magoha said that teachers have played a big part in preparing learners for the imminent national examinations.

The CS also assured that learners involved in arson shall be punished.

Magoha said that parents shall be responsible for paying what shall be destroyed as a result of the actions of their children in schools.

The KNEC report indicated that there was a big loss in learning on students for the period schools had to close to mitigate the impact of COVID-19.

Findings from the report are in the assessment done in October 2020 to all learners and an examination – like the model was adopted in all subjects that are examinable.

According to the assessment, most of the Class Eight learners performed below average and failed to achieve the minimum marks of 50 percent in most of the subjects where the assessment was conducted.

The intention of the study was to find out Class 8 pupil’s performance levels in subjects examined in KCPE after the Coronavirus-enforced closure of schools.

It was expected that assessment on learning would provide information to teachers and other stakeholders of education on any loss in learning caused by the lack of face-to-face learning and the failure of e-learning provided by various schools and the government as well. The failure of virtual learning was occasioned by most of the students not able to access the internet, something that coronavirus itself caused as many parents lost their jobs as companies laid off staff in order to try and survive amid COVID-19.

The assessment shows that pupils in schools located in urban areas recorded more mean scores than those in schools from the rural areas in all subject areas assessed except in Kenya Sign Language.

Christian Religious Education (C.R.E), Islamic Religious Education, Hindu Religious Education, and English Langauge had mean scores of 60.1, 58.7, 57.8, 55.5, and 50.3 respectively.

It is clear that Social Studies, Kiswahili Language (Lugha), Mathematics, and the Kenya Sign Language reported mean scores that were lower than the minimum expected mean of 50 having 49.5, 48.9, 44.8, and 43.3 percent respectively.

Low marks are in English, Kiswahili, and Kenyan Sign Language compositions, with KSL registering the lowest mean score of 36.9, English had 44.7, and Kiswahili having 46.6 respectively.

As in most exams in previous times, girls performed better than boys in English with girls getting a higher mean in both language and composition at 51.3 and 46.5 and 49.3 and 42.8 percent.

In Kiswahili, girls achieved 49.6 and 49 percent in language and composition respectively against the 48.2 and 44.2 achieved by boys.

In subjects like Mathematics and Science, boys performed better than girls getting means of 45.3 and 44.3 against 59.2 and 56.4 respectively.

The study also revealed that pupils in private schools got higher mean scores than those in public schools in all the assessed subjects.