Samuel Siringi
5 July 2009
Nairobi — This year's Form Four national exams will be subjected to a new water-tight marking system that guarantees greater accuracy and fairness in awarding scores.
The new chain system bars markers from handling all questioned answered by a candidate in any paper. Instead, an examiner will be required to mark only one question from any candidate, according to the Kenya National Examinations Council.
This means that a paper like Christian Religious Education paper two, which requires a candidate to answer four questions, will be marked by four different examiners. One examiner will mark a single question and pass the next to a colleague in what is being called the conveyor-belt system.
The new chain system was strongly supported by secondary school heads, who were interviewed during their annual meeting that ended in Mombasa on Friday.
The Nation learnt that all exam papers for the more 330,000 candidates who will sit the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) this year will be marked using the new system.
According to KNEC chief executive officer, Mr Paul Wasanga, the new marking system has undergone two years of piloting and will be fully used in all examinable subjects later this year.
Weed out
The headteachers said the system will weed out individual biases common when one examiner handles all papers of a centre.
"This is a fantastic system that should have been enforced much earlier," said Meru's Nkueni Girls' School principal Eunice Maeke.
"KNEC is always thinking of water-tight and innovative ways of making examination processes more efficient to improve standards of certification to remain at par with the best in the world," said Mr Wasanga.
The conveyor-belt system will make the awarding of marks fairer and balanced," he added.
School principals who spoke to Nation on the sidelines of their week-long conference organised by the Kenya Heads of Secondary School Heads Association, threw their weight behind the reform plan.
Ms Maeke said the marking system will now ensure more consistency in awarding scores since one examiner will take charge of the entire question in any paper.
According to Mr James Mbothu, the head teacher of Broadway Secondary School in Thika, marking of a single question by each examiner is a better check of quality than in the previous system where quality was only the responsibility of a team leader.
According to Ms Mary Osungu, the principal of St John's Girls in Trans Nzoia, the system will eliminate biases in marking.
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