Forget KCSE results, evaluate and improve the education system

Wachira Kigotho

After absorbing the shock waves of the impact of poor performance of schools and students in last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exam, some interested parties are now demanding an intensive audit of the results.

The centrality of their thesis is that those results in educational terms lacked validity and in effect were not reliable, simply because their statistical distribution did not reflect a normal curve. In this regard, Akello Misori, the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) Secretary-General, argues a normal curve would have shown a few top performers and a similar number at the bottom, with the majority of students in the middle.