Guest Writer

Feb 27, 2005

<b>Moses Biina</b><br>Primary Leaving Examinations, Uganda Certificate of Education and Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education results have been released. If one is to go by the statistics exhibited therein, it is clear that private schools performed best in the country.

Government- aided schools with a poor pupil-teacher ratio performed poorly
Primary Leaving Examinations, Uganda Certificate of Education and Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education results have been released. If one is to go by the statistics exhibited therein, it is clear that private schools performed best in the country. Most pupils in these schools excelled. This has forced many to think that private schools can do the impossible. They can turn the “dense” into brilliant, the weak into strong and the poor into rich. Private schools have reason to rejoice and boast. However, there must be something abnormal somewhere. Under normal circumstances, not all the pupils are as brilliant as portrayed by these schools. A few are expected to excel, the majority average and a few are meant to fail assuming the examinations were properly set. My question is, how have these schools managed to do away with the poor performers? Remember, “the poor will always live with us.” Shouldn’t we therefore question the validity and reliability of examination results? Or we should say they do the work that Universal Primary Education (UPE) schools cannot do. One would question the validity and reliability of examinations, but UPE schools exonerate the examiners. Some UPE schools’ results show that most pupils
perform poorly. However, a normal distribution of grades is exhibited by the majority whereby very few excelled, very many were average and very few failed. UPE schools therefore skew the trend.
What is the mystery behind the performance in private schools? Possibly, the proprietors sunk in a lot of capital and would love to get maximum returns by creating the impression that their schools do not have any failures. They therefore get more parents taking their children to such schools at whatever cost. They do all they can to dissociate them from failure.
On the other hand, government-aided secondary schools have beaten the private schools in UCE and UACE examinations. In case there are any in the latter, which have excelled they are just “punctuations” of the former. A close look at their results indicates a normal distribution of grades. The “traditional schools” which have struggled to put a number of things in place also posted normal results. One of them is improving the teacher-pupil ratio.
The government-aided schools, whose teacher to pupil ratio is poor, still performed poorly. A poor teacher-pupil ratio has contributed to the poor performance of UPE schools. If this is improved, they can beat the private schools.

The writer works with
Busoga University

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