IN SHORT: There is no truth to posts claiming parents can already check Kenya Junior School Education Assessment results through SMS or USSD codes. Some of the codes circulating are scams.
The Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) is the national end-of-junior secondary exam for grade 9 learners under the competency based curriculum.
The 2025 exam, written between 27 October and 3 November, was the first ever. The government has said the results will be released by 11 December 2025.
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Despite this, a TikTok account has been posting videos claiming that the results are already out and directing users to dial various UUSD codes to access them. USSD stands for unstructured supplementary service data. Users dial them on their mobile phones to communicate with a service provider's computers, most commonly for banking, airtime and account services.
The videos have collectively been viewed more than 144,000 times.
But is any of this true? We checked.
News posts inaccurate and TikTok posts false
The TikTok posts are false and deliberately misleading.
The confusion seemingly stems from news sites misreporting a legitimate message from Safaricom, the largest telecoms company in the country.
The Safaricom SMS said: "To check KJSEA learners selected schools, send their assessment number to 22263. The SMS costs KSh30."
The message is accurate, but it refers only to checking the schools a learner applied to attend. At the time of publication, the KJSEA results had not yet been released, so the SMS service would not show results or final placement.
The news articles in question suggested that exam results could be checked through the same service, giving the impression that they were already out.
School placement will only occur about a week after the results are announced. The official portal for checking KJSEA details is selection.education.go.ke. Currently, the 22263 code only reveals the schools to which learners applied.
The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) publicly flagged some of the news articles as fake, warning: "Beware of agents of fake news and misinformation. Do NOT be misled!"
While the news outlets may have inadvertently got it wrong, the TikTok posts are disinformation. They promote fake USSD codes that have no connection to any examinations.
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Instead, the codes are part of a scam that tricks users into subscribing to paid services. Such scams are common during exam seasons, and KNEC recently warned the public about other fraud attempts.
The KJSEA results have not been released as of 9 December. They are set to be released by 11 December.
