Seeking a better way of ranking secondary schools after exams

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

28 October 2018

I was shocked by the news that President Uhuru Kenyatta has issued a warning to examination candidates, teachers and parents that if they engage in any form of cheating, “wataona cha mtema kuni”. I would have expected the President to give words of encouragement and to wish the candidates success.

All the same, examinations are a very big deal in Kenya. Probably bigger than elections. The competition is not just among the candidates but also between schools, sub-counties and counties.

Thankfully, the ministry of education no longer ranks of primary schools’ performance in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) exam. Ranking of secondary schools however continues. But I find the method used both misleading and lazy!

It is misleading because it does not tell us anything about the performance of the schools and lazy because very little thinking is needed to calculate the ranking parameter.

I wrote about this deficiency in March 2014 and demonstrated that the only reason the so-called “top schools” remain at the top is that they enroll the top students. What we need is a system that tells us whether the schools improved the academic performance of the students.

I recently saw the report card of a form one student at The Nairobi School and thought that it can be adopted on a national scale. It showed the students rank based on the admission marks (KCPE) and the current position based on the last end-of-term school exam.

This way, the student is able to judge whether he was lagging behind his classmates or not. If he was at the top on admission marks and is now near the bottom, it means that there is something not going right with his learning.

This method can be adopted for entire schools. The Kenyan National Examinations Council (KNEC) can use the admission KCPE scores of pupils to rank the secondary schools. This will tell us which amongst them admitted the brightest children.

Then, four years later the schools are ranked again using the currently existing method. However, the process does not stop there: this rank is compared to the form one enrollment rank.

To get an “improvement factor”, we may divide the initial enrollment rank by the final one. Finally, the school’s aggregate KCSE score is multiplied by this value to yield the ranking score.

As an illustration; suppose the admission KCPE marks of a secondary school puts it in position 500 nationally. Then at KCSE, it emerges at position 400 using aggregate marks. The improvement factor is 500/400 = 1.25.

Suppose further that the KCSE aggregate performance index for this school was 50 points. We now multiply 50 by 1.25 to get ranking score; this comes to 62.5. This now, is the value to be used in deciding the final rank.