The results of this year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination may be out next week. Based on its previous commitment to parents and the candidates, the Kenya National Examination Council (Knec) could release the results by Wednesday.
Knec chairman George Magoha recently said the council had made critical adjustments in the marking process, and noted the results may be out “much earlier” than last year. The 2017 KCPE results were released on November 21
Speaking at the launch of this year’s national examinations at Pangani Girls’ High School, Prof Magoha hinted that the council had invested in technology that will enhance marking, tallying and swift relaying of results this year.
Machine tallying
“We must again prepare to receive results early because of what we have done to Insha and Composition,” Magoha said, adding: “If we want, we may even release the results after three days.” Sources at Knec said several test-runs had been done on the new technology. The new marking machines, known as Optical Mark Recognition (OMR), have been fine tuned for speedy marking of the Kiswahili Insha and English Composition papers. OMR technology captures marked data from candidates’ answer sheets using specialised scanning. OMR marks up to 10,000 scripts per day. Scripts are marked in batches of 100 and 200 sheets. The marked Insha and Composition scripts will be scanned though the machines to accurately tally marks and make entries in record time, cutting down the marking process. The manual tallying and entry of Insha and Composition marks was cited as the reason release of the examinations delayed.
