Ahead of the national examinations that begin on Monday July 18, the National Examination and School Inspection Authority (NESA) boss has shed light on the process of preparing the national examinations, the marking grading, among others.

The New Times’ Aurore Teta Ufitiwabo caught up with Bernard Bahati, the Director-General at NESA, who talked about the preparation of questions, marking, and grading, among others.

How do you come up with the questions for the exam and who selects them? Take us through that process until the printing stage.

Before, usually, the whole process was done without the direct involvement of teachers.

However, this year, we involved the teachers in the preparation of question items because we believe that they are in the right position to come up with the question items that reflect the reality of curriculum implementations in the schools.

So we meet them in one area and then they set the question items to be in the bank for each examinable subject. This bank is used by the NESA staff in charge of exams to set national exams papers and then after this, another team of teachers comes to proofread and validate questions items.

Once the second group has done rechecking the questions stored in the bank, the NESA examination specialists go through the bank and develop the examination papers, and once the entire team in NESA approves that the questions followed the guidelines and standards, they are taken to the printing house.

How did you select the teachers to be part of setting question items?

The selection has been done on the district as well as school levels. There were criteria set for one to fulfil to be part of the team, including being qualified in the subject and working experience among others.

How is printing done and how secure is it to avoid leakage?

All printing processes are done in total security where we work with security organs to avoid leakage or anything else that can affect the national examinations.

Now we work with one printing company and more than 100 people in the entire process from design to the printing and those people live on site until the last examination papers are administered.

For instance, those who printed this year’s paper entered the site in May and they will leave on August 5 after the last exam is done. Within the whole process, there are tight security measures in place to curb all mistakes that can affect the exams.

Then after being printed and packaged, the exams are taken to the districts which is also done securely too as well until they reach the examination centres and are kept in what we call ‘strong rooms’ with other materials.

Once the exams are completed, what next and how long does it take for the results to be published?

It’s the same channel as the ones on distributing them to the district level and after they are taken to marking centres for markers to begin their work.

However, there is no specific timeline for the results to be published but marking takes 30 to 40 days and we always start with primary and ordinary level candidates.

The markers are the qualified teachers with the experience of at least two years and must be people of integrity among other qualities.

After reaching the marking examination centres (we currently have 19 of them) which will have over 13,000 markers first sit for the exams they are going to mark.

Step two is harmonizing the marking guide by looking at the exams and marking scheme and then proceeding with the marking simulation where they take the samples to correct them to familiarise themselves with the marking guide to be on the same level of marking, then that’s when the actual marking starts.

In the marking process, one booklet is marked by between five to seven markers with the team leader whose work is to check the awarded marks if they are the same for each marker then after there is another team that comes to check if all sheets were marked fully and reflect marking scheme among others, and at the same time record the marks for grading.

Then the last step is to double-check the marks again by printing out the marks and doing parallel checking with the one in the system for grading.

How do you grade as well as set pass marks?

The grading is done once all marks are in the system where we check the marks and generally focus on the marks students scored, the level of success in each subject and the number of those for example who scored above or below 50 and how the exam was for students as well as the teachers among other points.

After checking all the necessary points, then we analyze the conditions the exams were done in then do the analysis considering all points and come up with the passing marks then following the grading that when the computing comes in to put the students in various divisions and the category they are in are the ones that determine the schools they attend.

How do you rank the schools? Will there be a ranking this year?

The ranking was also another step after the results but there will be no ranking anymore for the public; it will be done internally just in case of fixing some gaps.

What will be done, as usual, is only announcing the best performers candidates.