2019 UCE: Performance improves, boys beat girls

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Last year, O'level candidature increased, and more girls than boys registered and sat the final exams. Meanwhile, the rate of malpractice dropped, with the results of 1,262 candidates withheld - lower than the statistic of the previous year - pending a hearing.

2019 UGANDA CERTIFICATE OF EDUCATION (UCE)

By Joseph Kizza

@joekizza

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KAMPALA - The education and sports minister, First Lady Janet Museveni, has been particularly critical of the reported practice by teachers of rushing through the syllabus, months before the scheduled end of the cycle, saying it is "a very wrong development".

She said compression of the syllabus deprives learners of adequate knowledge because many topics are skipped in the assumption that they are easy to grasp - which is not necessarily true.

"The entire curriculum is meant to develop learners," she said.

Mrs Museveni, who is also the First Lady, pointed this out in her speech moments before releasing the 2019 Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) results to the public at the Office of the Prime Minister in Kampala.

 

The results carried many positives.

To begin with, overall performance, improved with 92.2% passing compared to 87.2% in 2018. Also, failure rate "dropped significantly" from 12.8% to 7.8%.

Candidature increased by 2,285 - from 335,435 the previous year to 337,730 in 2019. This represents a 0.7% percentage increase.

We learnt that as many as 144,256 (42.7%) of the candidates were beneficiaries of the Universal Secondary Education (USE).

Another highlight was that for the first time, more girls than boys - 398 - registered and sat the final O'level exams.