Knec had earlier changed the date for examiners involved in marking the papers. Initially the examiners were to report for the marking exercise on 18th March 2021 but Knec changed the date to 15th March. Successful examiners were asked to report for the marking of insha and composition papers at Alliance High School.
“CHANGE OF REPORTING DATE FOR EXAMINERS. You are expected to report on Tuesday 15th March 2022 at ALLIANCE HIGH SCHOOL latest by 3pm. Coordination begins immediately. Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this change. Thank you,” read a message sent to one of the examiners.
This year the council registered 1,225,507 candidates in 28,316 KCPE examination centres as compared to 1,191,752 candidates in 28,467 centres in 2020.
The marking of multiple-choice questions were made easier by the acquisition of the modern Optical Mark Recognition which electronically scores the papers.
The OMR captures marked data from candidates’ answer sheets using specialised scanning.
The machines work with a dedicated scanning device that shines a beam of light on the paper.
The contrasting reflection at predetermined positions on a page is used to detect marked areas as they reflect less light than the blank areas of the paper.
With the new machines, scripts are marked in batches of 100 and 200 sheets, unlike the previous technology, which took hours.
The OMR machines are also used to speed up the tallying of Kiswahili Insha and English Composition marks, which were previously done manually by examiners. The two papers are still marked manually