Retain examinations at all levels of tier

Kennedy Buhere

Kenya Secondary Schools Heads Association Chairman, Mr Cleophas Tirop has proposed that Government abolish Kenya Certificate of Primary examination (KCPE) because it was locking out thousands of children from secondary school.

"The system should be replaced with a test that will identify pupils to join selected schools and talented academies," the press quoted Mr Tirop as saying.

I found the suggestion by Mr Tirop misleading. It is the lack of first-rate teachers and principals with proven superior teaching and management experience and skills that deny thousands of children the benefit of good secondary school learning experience.

In addition, hundreds of secondary schools lack basic learning facilities and equipment like classrooms, well-equipped libraries and laboratories. They also lack qualified librarians, and laboratory technologists to guide, couch and mentor students in the right use of these facilities.

Massive injunctions

Standard eight exams have nothing to do with children access to quality teaching and learning experience in Secondary schools.

The best answer to this is massive injunctions of a billion-plus shillings into revamping and building teaching and learning facilities in secondary schools and employing enough teachers to meet the shortage facing public schools.

While we have issues with the exam-oriented system of education here, it has little to do with restricted access of learners to secondary school education.

Public examinations play a fundamental role in an educational system worth its salt.

According a professor of education at Dublin’s University’s St Patrick’s College Thomas Kellaghan Educational Research Centre, Thomas Kellaghan public examinations enables policy makers to obtain information about the knowledge, attitudes, or skills of a learner or group of learners have acquired over time.

Information from an assessment is used to determine promotion to the next tier of education, grade retention, and certification of achievements, to give feedback to students about their progress, strengths, and weaknesses."

In a paper entitled Public examinations, national and international assessments, and educational policy, Kellaghan further observes: "(examinations) motivate students by providing goals or targets; to judge instructional effectiveness and curricular adequacy; to describe the achievements of an education system; to assess the effectiveness of schools; to monitor student achievements over time; and to guide policy formation and decision-making."

Expunge public examinations from the educational system (let alone in standard eight) and you remove a tool that can give us fair assessment of learners learning experience and aptitudes devoid of the bias of teachers in Primary and Secondary school system.

With a public or national examination, standards are established and act as a monitoring and evaluation of learning outcomes policy makers expect out of a formal education experience.

Remove that and you create uncertainty in teaching and learning — what with teachers who are indolent; what with school community which is ready to cheat and have its learners pass with flying colours through hook and crook?

The question of failure does not hold in a country with rising economic growth because a robust economy comfortably absorbs citizens with sufficient literacy into a growing job market.

Catapulting Millions

According to The Economist, October 2nd-8th, 2010, 20 million Brazilians have emerged from poverty and joined the market economy. "We are starting to lay steps so that the poorest begin to rise up to the lower middle class and then to the middle-middle class," the paper quotes, Brazil President, Luiz Lula da Silva, as saying.

India has catapulted millions into the middle class. With a $1.3 trillion economy, India is expanding 8.5 per cent, according to the World Bank and IMF.

China is replicating the same dizzying growth rates — having "grown’ its middle class to unprecedented levels — through shrewd calibration of the economy using monetary and fiscal instruments available to any Government.

Therefore, the probability of failure for someone who has had at the very minimum — 250 marks in KCPE and D+ in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) — is almost zero. A robust economy wants labour — skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled.

Rampant Immorality

The challenges facing educational policy makers are immense. The phenomenal school enrolment following the free primary and secondary education wasn’t followed with recruitment of teachers to match the numbers; falling standards in students performance in crucial subjects such as mathematics, the sciences, and English language; rampant immorality of some teachers; lack of a foolproof system of nurturing competent administrators to manage schools.

These and other questions are enough to occupy the hearts and minds of education policy makers. To talk about examinations is to miss the central issues facing education in Kenya today.

On the contrary, we can use exams as and a national asset and not a constraint. We can improve our testing procedures by improving, in a fundamental way, our teaching and learning environments.

Our education should be geared towards nurturing our ability to think, analyse and consider. Examinations should be set not to test memory, information and all that — but to test judgments, critical and analytical faculties.