Schools don’t reveal all the results!
Jan 25, 2009
EDITOR—Whenever examination results are released by the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB), the desire of every parent is to see how their children’s school has performed. However, I am disappointed by the decision of some schools to deny paren
EDITOR—Whenever examination results are released by the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB), the desire of every parent is to see how their children’s school has performed. However, I am disappointed by the decision of some schools to deny parents a chance to look at how all the students performed.
This leaves me wondering about the motive of hiding the results from us yet judging from what is written in the newspapers, the schools I am referring to have performed very well.
I thought as parents, we had the right to find out how our children performed generally. This gives us the inspiration to sell the school to our colleagues so that they can make informed choices as to where to take their children. Other schools display their results on notice boards and I am left wondering whether there is not something fishy about the results that my children’s school is trying to hide from parents.
It is we parents who contribute to the continued existence of the school by taking our children there and encouraging others to join it. But how can I do that when I have no knowledge about the general performance of the school? It is not enough to depend on the percentages in the newspapers.
After all, after the results have been released, the same newspapers advertise other schools which are well known for their poor performance as best performers! I only thought the list of results is exposed to parents to help them judge the general performance of the whole class other than relying on statistics from newspapers.
Remember not all grade one’s are good. So, telling us that “my school†got 98% grade 1 is not enough. What if that percentage has the lowest mark of grade one?
Our major interest is to know whether the schools our children go to are doing well or not. So if the administration can’t show us the full list of the results of the pupils, then it leaves room for suspicion that what is in the papers might not be the true reflection of what is on the ground.
Why are results not displayed on the notice boards for everybody to see, only to see them in the newspaper adverts when the names of some children who performed badly are missing? In future I suggest that newspapers should refuse to publish results of schools which do not give them the full list of their candidates.
This is because the media houses might inadvertently be encouraging dishonesty and fooling parents. How do the media houses know some or all the names have not been fabricated to lure parents to take their children to these schools.
Prof Mahmood Mamdani was spot-on with his observations about making education a commodity and hawking it in the marketplace. i request UNEB to resume publishing the results of all the candidates
Name withheld
This leaves me wondering about the motive of hiding the results from us yet judging from what is written in the newspapers, the schools I am referring to have performed very well.
I thought as parents, we had the right to find out how our children performed generally. This gives us the inspiration to sell the school to our colleagues so that they can make informed choices as to where to take their children. Other schools display their results on notice boards and I am left wondering whether there is not something fishy about the results that my children’s school is trying to hide from parents.
It is we parents who contribute to the continued existence of the school by taking our children there and encouraging others to join it. But how can I do that when I have no knowledge about the general performance of the school? It is not enough to depend on the percentages in the newspapers.
After all, after the results have been released, the same newspapers advertise other schools which are well known for their poor performance as best performers! I only thought the list of results is exposed to parents to help them judge the general performance of the whole class other than relying on statistics from newspapers.
Remember not all grade one’s are good. So, telling us that “my school†got 98% grade 1 is not enough. What if that percentage has the lowest mark of grade one?
Our major interest is to know whether the schools our children go to are doing well or not. So if the administration can’t show us the full list of the results of the pupils, then it leaves room for suspicion that what is in the papers might not be the true reflection of what is on the ground.
Why are results not displayed on the notice boards for everybody to see, only to see them in the newspaper adverts when the names of some children who performed badly are missing? In future I suggest that newspapers should refuse to publish results of schools which do not give them the full list of their candidates.
This is because the media houses might inadvertently be encouraging dishonesty and fooling parents. How do the media houses know some or all the names have not been fabricated to lure parents to take their children to these schools.
Prof Mahmood Mamdani was spot-on with his observations about making education a commodity and hawking it in the marketplace. i request UNEB to resume publishing the results of all the candidates
Name withheld