Boys outshine girls in UCE results
Anselm Ashaba of Nsambya Hill Side High School in Nakirebe, Mpigi being lifted by his former schoolmates after learning he was scored Aggregate 8 in 8. PHOTO BY ABUBAKER LUBOWA
What you need to know:
Although the girls performed better in some subjects, the boys outsmarted them in the general scores.
Kampala
The 2013 Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) results released yesterday show that boys performed better than girls overall.
However girls performed better in both English Language and Literature in English. Boys performed better in the other large entry subjects as has been the case in the past three years.
Out of the 289,012 candidates, who registered for the examinations, 47.9 per cent (137,276) were girls representing 97.7 per cent of the registered females, while 52.1 per cent (151,736) were boys. The overall performance of male candidates was higher in divisions One, Two and Three while girls registered a fair performance in divisions Four and Nine.
Education Minister Jessica Alupo said the trends of the girls and boys performance keep changing and there is need to assess that. “In line with the ministry policy, I treat boys and girls equally but girls face more challenges like hard work at home and the threat of early marriages and these contribute to their underperformance which we need to look at.”
Uneb chairperson Fagil Mandy said the question of girls under-performing in certain areas needs to be researched. “We need to find out why girls are performing well in some areas and not in the others.”
He called on different stakeholders, including the media to carry out studies and come up with answers as to why it is happening. The ministry of Education last year promised to commission a study to look into the performance disparities between the boys and girls but the findings are yet to be released.
In 2007, the government introduced the Gender in Education Policy, which was designed to ensure that the needs to the girl-child were met. The major issue at stake was that there were more boys than girls in school.
Dr Mary Goretti Nakabugo, the country coordinator Uwezo Uganda, said the trends have shown the gap between boys and girls is much lower but the emphasis has been put on enrollment of more girls in school and not their quality. “The focus has been to get the girls to school and not what they can do there and I think this is still a challenge,” she said.
Meanhwile, out of the 34 inmates that sat examinations at Luzira upper prisons, there was no female inmate. It remains unclear whether the girls’ improved performance in the English Language exams can be attributed to O’level English paper sitting format change. Candidates effective the 2013 academic year were required to answer one question on functional skills (Section A) and another on Creative writing (Section B) unlike before when one could answer two questions from the same section, in most cases section B.
