Alliance Boys top with highest number of As
Irene Githinji and Nyaboga Kiage
Alliance Boys High School leads the pack in the number of students who scored Grade A plain in the 2020 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exam whose results were released on Monday.
The school registered 77 As out of the 395 candidates who sat the examination, with an overall mean grade of 10.85.
A tally compiled by People Daily yesterday showed that traditional good performers dominated the list of schools that had a high number of students posting straight As.
Kapsabet Boys, which has been posting impressive results in recent years, was second with 65 As, followed by Alliance Girls with 55, Kenya High School with 53, Maranda Boys 48 and Kiambu’s Mang’u High with 42.
Murang’a High School made headlines yesterday after producing the best candidate countrywide, Simiyu Wanjala, who had a mean grade of A plain with 87.3 points.
On the overall, the school had 30 candidates scoring plain As out of 283 students who sat the exam while Nairobi’s Light Academy and Mary Hill had 25 students each in the category.
Yesterday, Alliance High School principal William Mwangi confirmed that his students had performed well and that the school was leading in the number of As scored nationally.
Medical condition
Mwangi said the students performed “very well”, particularly in Chemistry and chances were high the school led in the subject. A student in the school who scored a D plain had a medical condition and struggled to write his exams, the principal explained.
“The student had a medical condition and could sometimes fall asleep as examinations went on and had to be woken up several times, but at least he tried given his condition,” he said.
Mwangi said the Covid-19 pandemic did not affect the performance in any way as students worked even harder to perform better than 2019.
At Light Academy, Abraham Ouma topped the school out of 130 registered students after he scored A with 84 points.
The student told People Daily he hopes to join Havard University in the United States or the University of Nairobi.
“I am happy that I have done well and this came through hard work and having focus on my studies,” Ouma, who scored 405 marks in KCPE, said.
Other top performing schools were Maseno School, which had 24 students scoring plain As and Nairobi School with 22 straight As out of 374 candidates.
Unlike 2019, the Kenya National Examinations Council this time did not rank schools in terms of the number of As scored.
From our compilation, Asumbi Girls from Homa Bay County had 19 students with A plain, while Pangani Girls (Nairobi County) and Kagumo High (Nyeri County) had 17 and 16 plain As, respectively.
Agoro Sare High School (Homa Bay County), which produced the second best candidate nationally in Wasonga Udoma, also had 16 students with Grade A, Moi High School Kabarak had 15, while Friends Kamusinga and Kapsabet Girls had 13 As each.
Kisii High had 12 candidates with As while Lugulu Girls and Njiiri School had eight each.
Moi Tea Girls and Bunyore Girls had six students each with A plain.
On Monday, Education Cabinet Secretary Prof George Magoha disclosed that 893 candidates had obtained an overall Grade A in the exam compared to 627 in 2019.
“This is one of the clearest indicators that candidates have performed better in 2020 compared with 2019, the negative effects of Covid-19 notwithstanding,” the CS said when he released the results.
Out of the 893 candidates who scored A plain, 721 were from national schools, 97 from extra county schools, 2 from county schools, three from sub-county schools while 70 were from private institutions.
Magoha said the candidates navigated one challenge after the other in a manner that has now “left all of us with mirthful faces”.
“After looking at the impressive results posted by our KCSE 2020 candidates and taking into account the most trying environment in which they prepared for this examination, I am compelled to describe their show in one apt sentence: They fought their battle with resilience and ended it with grace,” said Magoha.
Kenya Private Schools Association Chief Executive Peter Ndoro lauded the performance, saying that results trickling in pointed to good grades.
“A general analysis so far shows that our students have done well. As at mid morning yesterday, we had received news that over 264 students had A-minus and above and we are still compiling data; we have 1,600 private secondary schools,” Ndoro said.
National schools
The grade count nationally indicated that national schools had 3,632 students with A- (minus) while extra-county schools had 1,922 students.
The number of B plus in national schools was 5,026 and 6,502 for extra-county institutions, while B plain candidates were 4,999 and 12,317, respectively.
In 2019, Kenya High led with 76 students scoring straight As, followed by Kapsabet Boys with 49 As, Alliance was third with 48 followed by Moi High School Kabarak which had 30 students.
Alliance Girls was fifth with 27 students scoring A plain followed by Mary Hill with 25, Maseno School, Mang’u and Nairobi school had 23 students each with A plain while Moi Girls Eldoret had 21.
Some 747,161 students sat for the 2020 KCSE out of which 380,327 were male while 366,834 were female, representing 50.9 per cent and 49.1 per cent of the total candidature.
The number of candidates with minimum university entry qualification of Grade C-plus and above rose to 143,140 in 2020 compared to 125,746 in 2019.
The remaining more than 600,000 candidates are legible to join TVET institutions, Teacher Training Colleges, Medical Training Colleges and other tertiary learning institutions for various courses.
