KCPE Private Schools Performance: BY ISMAIL ARTE RAGE: The moderation of private schools’ results in the 2020 KCPE exam was unfair and seriously damaged the morale of the children in these institutions.

KCPE moderation has been practised for many years now. It is a process in which a learner’s marks are reduced or increased by an independent marker to ensure assessment outcomes are within normal distribution of performance.

The process is ideally separate from the marking of assessments and done once all assessments are marked.

With the belief that private schools have better opportunities than their public counterparts, their individual subject marks are reduced to fit into the general range of performance.

Purity Ngina: I scored 235 marks in KCPE, but got my PhD at age 28

However the moderation of private schools’ marks in the recently released results was over the top giving a false impression that public schools indeed performed better than their private counterparts.

The 2020 KCPE exam was seriously over moderated resulting in turning the tables on private schools, with public schools suddenly in the top ranks. Nobody saw this coming. Statistically, there cannot be such a sudden change in performance between public and private schools.

In the 2020 KCPE, private schools observed about 20 marks deducted from a single subject, such as mathematics, which extreme. This is honestly unreasonable. None of the learners in private schools had above 80 per cent in mathematics. Similar deductions were made in all other subjects except the languages.

This has resulted in under scoring private school pupils to levels much below those in primary schools. It is therefore a complete fallacy that private schools performed worse than public schools. This does not happen overnight. I am afraid to say that the Ministry of Education misled the nation with this false assertion.

The extraordinary moderation in 2020 was based on a misinformed perception that private schools continued to offer learning during the Covid-19 lockdown last year.

While this assumption could be true to some extent, there were frequent disruptions of connection, absence of teachers and power shortages that adversely affected online learning.

KCPE Private Schools Performance: This opinion feature was first published in The Star newspaper.