Sunday, March 4, 2012

KCSE results reveal massive disparities in gender



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Education minister Prof Sam Ongeri during the release of a past national exam. The first ever ranking of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) candidates according to counties showed that girls are far away from matching their boy counterparts. Photo/FILE
Education minister Prof Sam Ongeri during the release of a past national exam. The first ever ranking of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) candidates according to counties showed that girls are far away from matching their boy counterparts. Photo/FILE 
By SAMUEL SIRINGI ssiringi@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Saturday, March 3  2012 at  22:30
IN SUMMARY
Despite efforts to address the status, the gap between boys and girls sitting national exams continues to rise
A new system of ranking examination candidates has exposed the regional rift in education standards that could force schools back to the drawing board if they are to remain competitive.
The first ever ranking of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) candidates according to counties also showed that girls are far away from matching their boy counterparts in a country where massive resources have been spent to even out the differences.
An analysis of the 2011 results released on Wednesday shows that girls lead in only eight of the 47 counties.
Girls led in Lamu, Kirinyaga, Kiambu, Kitui and Makueni. Other counties that were led by girls were Samburu, Uasin Gishu, Elgeyo Marakwet and Vihiga.
In all other counties, boys dominated the top 10 positions, in most cases taking all the slots.
The only county where girls took all the 10 positions was in Uasin Gishu. Nine of the girls were from Moi Girls High school, a national institution that emerged position six in the overall ranking with a performance index of 10.6. Faith Aseta led the standings in the county with a performance index of 12.4.
Besides dominating the top 10 positions in the counties, boys took all the 10 slots in some counties. They included Nyamira, Siaya, Tana River, Trans Nzoia, Busia, Bungoma, Garissa, Wajir and Mandera.
The dominance by boys does not augur for girls since the examinations are used to pick those who qualify to join public universities.
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It means there is a likelihood that the country will continue witnessing only a few women obtaining grades that allow them to join universities and other colleges. In the past, public universities have adopted an affirmative action policy that allows women to join the institutions with a point or two less than their male counterparts.
Another stark contrast revealed by the KCSE examination results was the wide gap between the performance of top candidates within the counties.
For instance, the top candidate in Mandera, Abdi Rashin Mohamed, who had a performance index of 11.5 could not qualify to be ranked among the top 10 in most of the counties.
Nationally, only about 15 counties posted candidates among the top 100 candidates.
In general, the performance in the exams showed that new academic giants are emerging in various counties eclipsing schools that have traditional dominated the rankings.
Former giants like Nyanza’s St Mary’s Yala and Cardinal Otunga, Mosocho and Shimo La Tewa from the Coast are receiving tough competition that has seen them lose their stranglehold.
Releasing the results, Education Minister Sam Ongeri noted that the gender gap remained high even though the number of those enrolling for the exams continued to rise.
The national gender ratio “is still skewed towards boys” even after rigorous campaigns to support basic education for all, he said. Last year, 23, 224 more girls sat for KCSE exams compared to the 159,380 who sat the same exam in 2010.
This represented a rise of 14.57 per cent. Similarly, boys increased from 198,100 to 230,330, an improvement of 15.68 per cent.
This means that there were 46,927 more male students who sat for the exam than girls.
Prof Ongeri said the national percentage ratio of boys to girls stood at 57:43.
On the overall, there were more boys than girls in 46 counties out of 47.
Kirinyaga County in Central region was the only one that had more girls sitting the 2011 KCSE exam while Mandera had the worst record of girls attending, and sitting the national exams.
Prof Ongeri challenged parents, teachers and government representatives to ensure all children attended school with the aim of sitting the national exams.
“My hope is that when each county gets results, they will put measures to mitigate (these) gender disparities,” he said.

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