Schools to stop assessing students using exam marks

What you need to know:

According to the curriculum developing body, students will start being assessed according to their abilities not marks scored like is the case in schools currently.

Kampala- The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) is proposing to change the current mode of assessment in secondary education to describe what individual learners have achieved annually, a top official at the centre has said.

If implemented, this proposed assessment will be a shift from the traditional examinations where learners are assessed basing on scores garnered in a given subject.

The body will also scrap the 32 subjects taught at O’ Level, and come up with only eight learning areas.

Mr Remegious Baale, a senior curriculum specialist at NCDC, told Daily Monitor yesterday the education system has been using normal referenced assessment where a teacher judges a learner’s performance according to how others have performed.
He says the teachers mainly rely on marks the student has scored to assess them rather than what they are able to do. But in this review, teachers will only look at individual competencies and write a report on their achievements.
“We want transcripts that are more detailed showing areas of competencies for each individual. We want to describe what a student has achieved and what they can do. It is very new to our education system and we need serious training in it,” Mr Baale said. “We cannot change abruptly. Teachers can still give marks but at S4, you should give levels of achievement and give a report about someone,” he added.

Mr Baale said they want to ensure the lower secondary curriculum assessment and examination reforms align with the already reviewed primary education curriculum and the yet to be reviewed A’ Level curriculum.

But this same assessment was introduced in primary schools under the thematic curriculum and its implementation seems to have stalled after complaints from various stakeholders including teachers saying it is hectic considering the large numbers of pupils they handle daily.
According to Mr Baale, the new changes will be effected when the proposed lower secondary curriculum is rolled out in 2017.

But he warns that this will be only be possible if government honours their recommendations which include training of teachers to implement the programme, procuring enough text books to work as teaching materials, among others.

“We may roll it out and you find there is no particular person in some learning areas to teach it,” Mr Baale said.

TEACHERS TO RETAIN THEIR JOBS

On the issue of some teachers losing their jobs, Mr Remegious Baale said they will retool all teachers who are willing to work with them in areas they think they are interested in.
But first, NCDC wants to carry out a research to establish how many are willing to stay in the system once it is rolled out. For instance, Mr Baale added, a student who studied and passed Physics, Economics and Mathematics but was given Business Studies when they joined National Teachers College can be retooled to teach Physics and Mathematics if they have interest. The training for these teachers will last two weeks before they can go and implement the curriculum.