Removal of exam ranking good for education sector

The release of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results yesterday marked a watershed moment in the ongoing education reforms.

Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu did not give a ranking of candidates, breaking a decades-old tradition.

He has, hence,prepared the parents and learners not to expect ranking of learners and schools when the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) is fully implemented in the country.

Ranking of candidates, whether at the school or national level, has no academic value and is not used in advanced education systems, where Kenya aspires to be. It takes away attention from individual abilities and focuses on irrelevant comparisons that do not aid learning.

There have been cases of children harming themselves on account of perceptions that they have failed due to their ranking among their peers.

Various stakeholders have also blamed the ranking for raising the stakes in education, fuelling examination cheating and rote learning, whereby learners are drilled on how to pass exams but barely understand the concepts they are expected to master. Exams have, thus, become a matter of life and death.

Learners have multiple intelligencies and assessment and measurement should focus on these. It is unfair to compare learners of different abilities using a tool that only measures one intelligence and labelling failures those who don’t fit in. Exams should be an assessment for, and not of, learning.

There is hope that, with CBC, this uniquely Kenyan problem will become a thing of the past and where assessment will focus on a learner’s weaknesses and strengths and what they can do to improve their acquisition on knowledge and skills.

So much is expected of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reform and this is one area for which they must give clear and concise direction. There is enough research and recommendations on the subject that have never been acted upon; this is the time to act, as other reforms are implemented.

For the reforms to be meaningful, the government cannot do it alone: Parents, guardians and sponsors need a complete mind shift to weed out cut-throat competition in education.