2018 KCPE: Technology hastens exam marking

Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed at Moi Girls Isinya. [Photo, Standard]

 The 2017 KCPE results were released on November 21, two days later than this year. In previous years, KCPE results were released just after Christmas and KCSE moved to the following year.

According to Prof  George Magoha, the chairman of the Kenya National Examinations Council, the council had invested in technology that enhances marking, tallying and swift relaying of results.

Sources at Knec say several test-runs had been done on the new technology. The new technology, known as Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) was fine-tuned for fast marking of Kiswahili Insha and English Composition papers.

OMR technology captures marked data from candidates’ answer sheets using specialised scanning. OMR ranks up to 10,000 scripts per day.

Scripts are marked in batches of 100 and 200 sheets. The marked Insha and Composition scripts are scanned by the machines which accurately tally marks and make entries in record time, cutting down the marking process.

This year Knec contracted 5,834 examiners to mark the scripts.

The manual tallying and entry of Insha and Composition marks was cited as the reason release of the results  would be delayed.