KCSE results reveal a drop in performance

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The (Kenyan) minister of education, Prof. Sam Ongeri, released the 2008 KCSE results today. This year’s results announcement was different in that it did not include the ranking of schools. Only students were ranked, with Mark Maugo and Velma Mukhongo emerging as the top boy and girl respectively. The top girl was fourth overall.The rankings also included lists of best students per subject.

The minister also noted a drop in performance, possibly related to the numerous strikes that rocked several schools mid last year. There were 460 fewer irregularities this year than there were last year.

While I appreciate the minister’s attempts to remove unhealthy competition among high schools, I still think that the ranking gave schools an incentive to make sure that ALL their students succeed. Now that only students are being ranked, we may end up with a case whereby schools only concentrate on their best students who will make it to the top ten lists of subjects nationally and forget about those at the bottom of the class. I think the media should do its job and find out which schools did better, to give parents a sense of where they ought to send their kids and to expose poor performers.

Competition breeds excellence, bwana Minister. And in any case you can’t erase the disparities between the ‘big schools’ as we know them and the smaller ones. The former still remain better funded and attract the best teachers. What the government should have done is not eliminate the rankings, but instead strive at improving all schools in the long run so that they can all compete fairly. Eliminating the ranking will not solve the problem, it is a shameful attempt to hide from the problem of inequality among Kenyan schools.

41 thoughts on “KCSE results reveal a drop in performance”

  2. I support your stand that schools should be ranked. I think we can start by ranking based on mean score and then subject based so that we as parents can get to know which secondary schools produce scienties, artists, etc. to enable us make wise decisions. How about you liaising with The Daily Nation or The Standard to use their news agents to gather this information.

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  28. Kindly reintroduce the ranking of schools because even if u do not publish the the reports from education offices to the schools still always have the mean scores and schools still compare their results.

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  29. Why dont you guys upload kcse results for like the past 2 years, it would realy bring us running 2 this website.Good work though,keep up!

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