By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

01 March 2015

People don’t fail school examinations because they are foolish or because they don’t understand the subject; they fail because they don’t know how to pass! Take the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE), for example: suppose candidate can did not bother to read any of the questions asked. What score would he get?

There are five objective papers taken in the KCPE comprising of multiple-choice questions where candidates choose the correct answer out of four alternatives labeled A, B, C and D. Then there are two compositions to be written; one in English and the other in Kiswahili.

The Mathematics and Science exams have 50 questions each. If our candidate entered the answers by random guesswork and without reading any of the questions, he would get either 12 or 13 of them correct.

The laws of probability would make sure of that. Only one of the choices in each question is correct, so the chance of marking it is one quarter. Now a quarter of 50 is 12.5 but since fractional marks are not possible, then he will either get 12 or 13 right answers.

Let us be prudent and take the lower score of 12. Converting this to a percentage, we get 24 per cent in each of these subjects. That makes a total of 48 marks out of 200.

The Social Studies and Religious education exam has 90 multiple-choice questions. Here, the laws of probability would yield a score either 22 or 23. Again, we prudently take the lower value, that is, 22 out of 90. This works out to 22.4 per cent. Adding this score to the previous total yields 70.4 out of 300 so far.

The English and Kiswahili language objective papers have 50 questions each. Our candidate would get 12 correct answers in each of these as well.

The compositions are marked out of 40 marks. If our candidate wrote some sentences in the correct language without reading the question at all, he/she would get one mark out of 40 – no matter how bad the grammar and spelling!

Adding this composition score to the one for the language paper bring the total to 13 out of 90. When converted to a percentage, this comes to 14.4 per cent in each paper.

We finally add all the marks together: 70.4 + 14.4 + 14.4 = 99.2. This is the score a candidate who doesn’t bother to read any question will get. For this reason I maintain that there is absolutely no academic reason why any candidate should score less than 99 out of 500 in KCPE: None whatsoever!

From the foregoing, it is quite clear that a candidate can score very good marks if he/she understands only half of the content. For this reason, it is difficult to understand why many schools rush to finish the syllabus in the last minute.

But still, we do get candidates scoring marks way below the academic minimum of 99 out of 500. I will explain how that happens next week.