The idea of scraping the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams is a great national academic concern in education reforms.
The exam has had a negative impact against many young talents who actually drop out in Class Eight, not because they are not clever, but because something psychological or physical might have happened to them during or shortly before the exam time.
There is also what we call examination fever, which brings with it nervousness, headache, sweating and break down of thinking capacity and lack of concentration among candidates.
This condition happens to anyone, even to a very intelligent child. This way, a child’s performance and subsequent results may be adversely affected. Failure becomes inevitable.
I was told of a sad story of a very clever child who scored only two marks in KCPE. Her parents went to the Examination Council for inquiry and after thorough recheck, they were all shocked by the results. This tells us how wrong we would be to gauge children’s intelligence through KCPE exams.
Future intellectuals
In place of KCPE, a new system of evaluating pupils right from Class One to Class Eight through continuous assessment tests should be used to gauge who proceeds to secondary or not. The CATs should be set by the national examiner and marked at individual schools. In this system, the terminal assessment results should be submitted by head teachers to KNEC for a data bank.
Alternatively, the system should start examining pupils form Class Four or Five to Eight.
This way, we shall do academic justice to our children and rightly save our future intellectuals. The system would compromise our education standards in no way because the curriculum will remain the same. Teachers will not need any extra training but will have to ensure the syllabus is covered in every class. The system would remain as 8-4-4 but change of examinations.
Joab Katonya, Via Email
Claims that the current 8-4-4 system burdens students are farfetched especially in the primary education sector. This is because with the scrapping of practical subjects such as Art and Craft, Home Science, Music, Agriculture and Business Education in 2001, the subjects were thus reduced to five.
Since then, the subjects are quite manageable to a primary school pupil as it gives him or her time to engage in co-curricular activities which are essential to the growth of the child.
Therefore, as the Ministry of Education goes on reform the system caution should be taken not to dilute the system further.
{Loiceanne Muchemi, Nairobi}
