The Ministry of Education through the National Examinations and Schools Inspection Authority (NESA) is set to release new guidelines governing the national examination process. The development was revealed by Gaspard Twagirayezu, the State Minister in charge of Primary and Secondary Education on July 26 during the launch of the national examination for ordinary and advanced levels of secondary school. “This year we tried to improve the process and rules that the national exams conducted and soon NESA will explain and publish those new guidelines,” he said In addition, he revealed the new guideline will help in explaining the whole process of how exams are conducted, the marking process, the grading and the publishing of the marks among others. Twagirayezu further revealed that in the process of the publication of results they have since harmonized the marking system and how the marks are recorded. “In the past, we had about five ways to record and publish marks according to the levels. For instance, those in primary school had their own system; the same applies to high school, TVET and TTCs, he explained. However, now we have harmonized the scoring system and all levels will be on the same scale. he added Previously for primary students with five aggregates was the first one and for the A ‘level in general education having 73 was the best which was also different from TVET and TTC marks. Among other improvements, he cited that the whole marking and grading are done and now we are going to use technology in the whole process and all the changes are in line with minimizing all malpractices as well as human interaction in the process. Speaking to The New Times Bernard Bahati, the Director-General of NESA revealed in a previous interview that previously, there were no proper guidelines governing National Examinations in general. “NESA developed the guidelines to curb the issues concerning the national exams process as well as guiding the entire process,” he said. In addition, Bahati pointed out that lack of harmonized and consolidated tools either legal or ministerial instruction, which govern the process of national exams was a challenge. Commenting on issues that will be tackled in the new guidelines he disclosed some including the process of claiming, the grading system “the grading has been harmonizing and simplifying and all the unnecessary elements were removed”. Moreover, he pointed out that after working on guidelines another development to improve the National Exams process was digitalizing all possible processes of exams, which include registrations of exams up to receiving certificates online among others. Meanwhile, the Primary Leaving Examination concluded last week on July 20,, and out candidates were expected to write the papers across 1,095 examination centres nationwide 99 percent of candidates turned up. According to NESA’s data, a total of 199,292 candidates in ordinary and advanced levels of secondary school, Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs), as well as Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) centres started national examinations on Tuesday.
