The Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) has come out to address discrepancies reported by some candidates in the just-released 2023 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results.
In a statement, KNEC Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr. David Njengere Saturday noted that the exam body had received appeals over some errors in results obtained through the shortcode 40054 that was provided by the Ministry of Education.
The council said it was brought to the attention of KNEC that results for some candidates had a misalignment of the marks and grades in Kiswahili as they were placed in the Kenyan Sign Language.
Dr. Njengere said there were also cases where the grades in Science and Social Studies and Religious Education were truncated incorrectly and were missing the plus (+) and minus (-) signs as expected.
Dr. Njengere explained, that the errors only affected SMS results as the results in the KNEC portal are accurate.
He however assured the candidates that the council has since raised the issue with the SMS service provider and errors in the text messages were fixed promptly.
“The error affected only the SMS results due to configuration issues, as the results in the KNEC portal are accurate. KNEC notified the SMS service provider and the error in the text messages was resolved immediately” he said.
The CEO said further KNEC received queries from candidates with low marks in some of the subjects, mainly in English and Kiswahili. KNEC has reviewed all the appeals and found that there were 133 candidates affected.
On alleged examination malpractices, after candidates in one of the schools scored similar marks in science, KNEC said “KNEC has studied the KCPE examination results for a school that was widely circulated on social media forums indicating all the candidates in the school attained an identical mark of 75 in Science. KNEC has reviewed the results for the school and all the reports that were received from the examination centres and anonymous letters and has not found any indication that the school was involved in examination malpractices”.
Dr. Njengere further explained that Science is a multiple-choice question paper, thus making it possible for the candidates to get identical marks.
“Though this may be assumed to be an examination irregularity, it is not adequate evidence for KNEC to sanction the results for candidates without a supporting report that cheating happened during the administration of the examination” he added.
Candidates have been advised to visit their schools and collect the official provisional results slips and raise any query for review of their results, if any, within the stipulated 30-day period.