Drastic exam changes Kenya National Examination Council plans to roll out

Drastic reforms that would change the format, administration and look of Standard Eight and Form Four examinations when implemented are in the pipeline.

The reforms are motivated by the need to ease management of national examinations, cut the cost of the national exercise and safeguard the credibility of test papers. 

The changes target the format of the exams, distribution and marking, which could substantially alter the way Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) and Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examinations are administered.

The proposed changes do not apply for the current crop of candidates who are already sitting their exams.

The Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec) says the reforms are necessary because the current format of examinations is expensive and prone to abuse. The exam body currently contracts up to 24,000 teachers to mark examinations and they are paid per the number of scripts they process, driving the cost of marking up to Sh1.7 billion per exercise.

Knec Chief Executive Officer Joseph Kivilu says the length of essay questions in Form Four examinations will be shortened and a mix of multiple-choice questions and those that require brief answers introduced.

This review is to also facilitate the electronic marking of KCSE to reduce the number of teachers hired to mark. Currently, KCPE examinations are partially marked electronically but there is manual intervention especially for essay sections such Kiswahili and English compositions.

Mr Kivilu argues the numerous long essays candidates are required to tackle per question require the council to hire many teachers to mark the examinations.

"What we are saying is that if we computerise marking of some questions, a teacher may only mark specific questions of an examination and pass it over to the next process," he said.

However, Kivilu clarified that the proposed introduction of multiple-choice questions should not be misconstrued to mean the exam will be easier adding that some of the papers will be scanned and sent by email to markers, unlike the current situation whereby teachers marking scripts gather in select institutions until completion of the exercise. 

"What they will do is to mark, score the candidates and email the papers back for the rest of the process. With this very few people will be involved and it will be easy to track accuracy of marks awarded," he said.

It is expected that a computerised system of marking will also eliminate cases where some schools or candidates claim they were victimised and demand re-marking of scripts.

Computer-based assessment

Kivilu revealed that plans are also underway to offer some examinations online through a computer-based assessment system that will see candidates tackling questions and submitting answers online.

"The lessons learnt here would help to shape bigger projects once stakeholders are on board," he said.

Once implemented, this system will see candidates answering different sets of the same questions arranged randomly to eliminate cheating.

This means that candidates sitting next to each other may not tackle the same questions at the same time.

"By the time one candidate is tackling question five, the neighbour will be doing question seven and so on," said kivilu.

"As an entry to computer-based testing, we shall start the piloting with the Qualifying Test examinations (QT) and then roll it out to the bigger projects," he added.

He said QT examinations are administered to candidates who intend to sit the KCSE examinations but did not sit the mandatory KCPE.

"We have always given these examinations and this time round, we want to make it computer-based to enable us test the system which we intend to roll out. But we shall also be offering hard copy," he said.

Kivilu said the new system will be launched this month in 100 centres, after which it will be rolled out for subsequent multiple-choice national examinations.

"We shall be doing it this week," he said adding that questions will be arranged in a different order under the computerised system.

"We are seeking an end to examination irregularities especially on multiple-choice questions where candidates copy or 'giraffe' to see what their neighbours have done," he added.

This means that KCPE candidates will be the first users of the system.

He said the new testing system will bring efficiency in administering exams.

"The system provides for an auto-marking method developed specifically to support automatic grading. A manual option of marking is however, also possible," he said.

He continued: "It will also ensure transparency in pre-examination and post-examination activities. We are setting up a robust data repository system that will cater for information needs of students, teachers and evaluators."

He said the system will make it possible to generate different versions of the same question for different students thus reducing chances of cheating, adding that all candidates will be registered electronically.

Controlled access

"The system has a security management component which controls access," he said.

The system, he added, also hopes to ride on the computers for schools' programmes once implemented.

"Tests can be taken using a simple personal computer and the minimal requirement is just a Web browser. However, once in the school setting, a proper design will be worked on," he assured.

Kivilu said the reforms require the support of all stakeholders.

"These are all ideas for which stakeholder buy-in is crucial because we need everyone's support," he said.

In an interview with The Standard, Kivilu said the Council will also automate operations in the process of handling examinations to minimise the human interaction that is blamed for leakage of examination questions.

"The idea is to seal all loopholes that can potentially compromise the integrity of examinations," he said.

An overhaul of distribution of examinations is also planned.

"We have had challenges during distribution of papers. We are in talks with senior security officers on how we can minimise contact with the examinations between the armouries and examination centres," he said.

And for proper co-ordination, Kivilu said most critical examination processes shall be moved to the new Mtihani House in South C, Nairobi.

"Management of national examinations is getting more difficult and costly under the current state of operation at the examinations council. Our offices are scattered all over," he said. The agency currently operates in six different locations in the city, spending Sh60 million on rent.

Knec has two bases for exam administration. One is at Caledonia on Dennis Pritt Road, Nairobi, where primary and secondary national examinations are released and another is in Industrial Area. Test development is done at another rented office in the National Bank Building.