The Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) on Wednesday, December 6 released a report on the 2023 KCPE examination that was released by Education CS Ezekiel Machogu on November 23.
A total of 1,415,315 candidates sat for the examination in 28,533 examination centres across the country.
According to the report, the processing of the KCPE examination results commenced immediately after candidates sat for their last paper.
KNEC said that the processing of the 2023 KCPE took the longest number of days since 2016 when the Ministry of Education introduced reforms in national examinations.
“The processing of the 2023 KCPE examination results was not rushed in any way and was undertaken as per the KNEC processing timelines for processing the KCPE examination results,” KNEC stated.
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The council noted that marking of the English Composition, Kiswahili Insha, Kenyan Sign Language Composition, and papers for learners with Visual and Hearing Impairment began on November, 3 2023, and was completed on November 18 2023.
In the process of marking the examination, KNEC used OMR Machines to mark Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) answer sheets while English Composition, Kiswahili Insha, Kenyan Sign Language Composition, and papers for learners with Visual and Hearing Impairment were marked by Examiners.
The English Composition, Kiswahili Insha, and Kenya Sign Language Composition were marked by a total of 5,755 trained examiners at 18 marking centers.
“The marking includes a period of coordination of the marking schemes and quality assurance by the senior examiners where they randomly sample what has been marked by each examiner and remark to ensure the scoring does not deviate from the marking scheme,” the report stated.
Confirmation of the KCPE examination answers for MCQ was done by a panel of subject experts.
“The scores for candidates are captured on OMR marksheets and machine read to capture all the scores into the examination processing system. As part of the Quality Assurance procedures, a sample of the OMR sheets per subject were picked at random and manually marked to validate against the OMR read scores,” said the council.
KNEC also standardized the 2023 KCPE results to facilitate the comparison of the performance of candidates across all the subjects.
The report further indicated that the council had truncation and misalignment challenges in the transmitting of results which were caused by configuration issues on the interface used to access results data from the database of the service provider by mobile network operators.
Meanwhile, KNEC disclosed it has a procedure for the resolution of results queries as guided by the Legal Notice No. 131 of the KNEC.
“Rule 27 on review of examination results that is to be lodged within 30 days of the release of results. KNEC has been receiving and reviewing queries from clients since the release of the results,” KNEC added.
