Why 2022 KCPE Candidates Were Special.
The announcement of the 2022 KCPE results marks the conclusion of a compressed academic calendar caused by the Covivirus-19 pandemic in 2020.
The candidates were in sixth grade when the epidemic struck, and they did not return to school until January 2021, when all schools reopened in difficult conditions.
Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu singled out the class for not only making history by completing the class eight curriculum in a record six months, but also for facing a second disruption in the form of lengthy half-term holidays during the August general election.
The class bucked the odds by achieving outstanding results, which were released on Wednesday.
“Congratulations to the class of 2022 for your spirited academic campaign that defied the triple challenge of a 24 general election, COVID-19, and shortened school calendars,” he said.
“Between January 2021 and November 2022 (just 23 months), this cohort has 21 managed to cover three school calendar years. This is astonishingly incredible. In fact, the cohort covered their Grade 8 school calendar in just six months, having joined in June 2022” he explained.
He added “ in between, the country went into a General Election that also occasioned an unnecessarily long half-term break, besides the confusion and anxiety associated with such a national exercise”.
Special needsSpecial needs
The best scorer among the 1,233,852 candidates who took the exam at 28,408 centers across the country earned 431 marks, a gain of three points from 428 in 2021. In total, 9,443 candidates scored at or above 400 out of 500 possible marks.
39 candidates with special needs earned 400 or more marks, compared to only two in 2021. The first candidate with special needs earned 419 more marks than the highest-scoring candidate in 2021, who earned 417.
The data analysis reveals that more than half of the candidates who took the exam (619,583 or 50.22 percent) got between 200 and 299 marks, compared to 578,106 or 47.17 percent who scored between the same marks in 2021.
The CS remarked when releasing the results on Wednesday, that he is quite impressed with the KCPE Examination class of 2022 for achieving exceptionally well and raising the benchmarks for the mean performance.
In addition, whereas 1,170 candidates got between 0 and 99 points on the 2021 KCPE Examination, only 724 candidates scored between 0 and 99 points on the 2022 Examination, despite a 29 percent increase in the number of candidates between the two years. This indicated that the majority of candidates earned higher grades than the previous year.
The CS congratulated all the stakeholders, especially the parents and teachers, for withstanding the financial and teaching pressures that came with the shortened school periods as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is the second-to-last administration of the KCPE before the 8-4-4 system of education is eliminated from the primary school curriculum next year.
Why 2022 KCPE Candidates Were Special.