KCPE exam results to be out in record time

Education CS Amina Mohamed (left) and Knec Chief Executive Mercy Karogo watch as candidates write final KCPE examination paper at the Defence Forces Memorial Hospital yesterday. [Edward Amaya, Standard]

The one million candidates who completed their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examinations yesterday will get their results in under 30 days.

The Standard has established that marking of the multiple choice questions will kick off immediately.

The papers will be marked using the optical mark recognition (OMR) machine acquired by the Kenya National Examinations Council (Knec), which was used for the first time last year.

The machine is said to have been fine-tuned to speed up the tallying of Kiswahili Insha and English Composition marks, which was previously done manually by examiners.

A total of 5,834 examiners have been contracted to mark the English and Kiswahili essays.

Knec has done several test runs on the modern technology and has said it is satisfied that this year the marking will be faster and more accurate.

The marked scripts will be scanned to verify the marks in record time compared to previous years when tallying was done manually.

This means after marking the scripts, the examiners will pass over the papers to the new machine, which will do the tallying of marks, thus improving accuracy.

OMR is the process of capturing marked data from candidates’ answer sheets using specialised scanning.

The machines work with a dedicated scanning device that shines a beam of light on the paper.

The contrasting reflection at predetermined positions on a page is then used to detect these marked areas because they reflect less light than the blank areas of the paper.

A senior Knec official said yesterday that the results previously delayed because of manual verification.

Last year’s KCPE results were released on November 21.

Speaking during the launch of the 2018 examinations, Knec Chairman George Magoha said this year's results could be out earlier.

“We must again prepare to receive results early because of what we have done to Insha and Composition,” Prof Magoha said at Pangani Girls High School.

Some sources have said the results could be out in three weeks.

Magoha said the council had invested in technology to enhance marking, tallying and swift relaying of results.

“If we want to we can even release the results after three days,” Magoha said.

On Wednesday the chairman reiterated that the results would be out faster than before. “We are confident that results will be out by end of November,” he said at Uhuru Gardens Primary School in Nairobi.

Speaking before the start of the KCPE examinations, Education CS Amina Mohamed said reforms had improved the examination process.

“Examinations are now more credible than they have ever been, and stand as a reliable measure of the level of achievement of individual candidates,” she said.