Ban on ranking fuels confusion as Alliance, Kabarak and Maranda claim top spot

NAIROBI: Leading secondary schools were Wednesday left fighting on which among them had emerged top, following the uncertainty created after the State discontinued ranking.

 

As a result, Kenyans might quite never know the best school in the country amid the confusion, as at least three claim top honors. Alliance High, Karabak and Maranda had all claimed the number one spot by Wednesday.

A technicality in the results which allowed schools to be ranked by both their mean score and performance index- the average of the best seven subjects taken by the candidates, helped create the confusion.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that only the individual institutions are custodians of their candidates’ results and are, therefore not open to an independent evaluation and scrutiny.

Interviews with several teachers revealed of the discrepancy with different schools settling on a measure that was favourable to gauge their own performance.

“One can only compare the performance of different schools by checking the average scores and no other measure,” a teacher at Alliance Girls High School who requested anonymity told The Standard.

Other teachers said the absence of a centralised ranking system had opened the floodgates to any school to claim it was the best performer because they would never be required to explain how they arrived at that.

Varying coverage by the different news outlets only helped to compound the matter. But The Standard was able to dig out how the students in the respective schools scored, as grouped by individual mean.

134 candidates at Kabarak attained As, 123 from Alliance High and 120 from Maranda.

Equally, Alliance had 119 of its candidates attain A- (minus), compared to 114 of Kabarak and Maranda’s 145. While only one student got a B- (minus) from Kabarak as the last candidate, Alliance had 11 and Maranda had 35.

Alliance High and Maranda, which separately told The Standard that their mean scores were 11.40 and 11.401 respectively, still had candidates who attained C+ and below. A highly confidential ranking seen by The Standard placed Kabarak at 11.358, ahead of Kapsabet High at 11.125. Maseno School was ranked third at 10.935 and Alliance fourth with 10.835.

FAKE RANKING

Maranda, according to the ranking was eighth with 10.452. Each of the schools has given different versions of their mean scores.

But the confusion may just have been escalated by a blogger who on Tuesday posted fake KCSE ranking online. Emboldened by the lack of an authoritative ranking scale, the blogger replicated the 2013 top 10 list of best performing schools to fool unsuspecting and anxious readers.

A salesman for one of the websites that promoted their ranking on Facebook told The Standard that his female colleague, who could not be reached on phone immediately, had compiled the results.