The Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) has released the 2022 UACE exams, indicating improved performance in subjects of History, Economics, Entrepreneurship Education, Geography and Art.
Mathematics and Chemistry recorded significant improvements at A pass level, while Physics had a drop at A but remained comparable at the A-E level.
While releasing the exam results in Kampala on Friday, 03 March 2023, UNEB Executive Director Dan Odongo said although there is a drop in the number of candidates registered this year, entries for Mathematics and the Science subjects (except Physics), increased significantly compared to entries for 2020.
“This was also observed in the 2020 examination where Mathematics and Science entries had also been higher than those for 2019 and before,” he said.
Mr Odongo said performance in Biology has again dropped below the 2020 level where it had risen.
“Examiners have attributed this to candidates having problems in questions on Genetics, Ecology and applications of biological concepts to the environment, Classification and inability to deal with simple mathematical computations in Biology,” he said.
A total of 97,889 candidates registered for the examination from 1, 969 Centres. Of the registered candidates, 42% were females while 58% were males.
Forty thousand, seven hundred thirteen (40,713) female candidates registered for UACE in 2022 compared to 41,190 in 2020. Females constituted 41.8% of the total number of candidates who took the examination in 2022.
In terms of percentages, Mr Odongo said female candidates performed better than their male counterparts at the principal level pass (A-E) in Arts (Humanities), Mathematics and Physics. However, male candidates were better in Agriculture, Chemistry, Biology, Art and General Paper.
However, he said, female entries for the Sciences and Mathematics have remained lower than that of the males, consistent with the fact that overall female entry is lower than that of the males. Candidature was 29.6% for Mathematics, 6.1% for Physics, 16.5% for Chemistry; and 15.9% for Biology. It should be noted that these percentages were lower (except for Physics) in the 2020 examination, and before.
Mr Odongo said candidates at lower levels demonstrated adequate to basic mastery of the subject matter.
He said their performance was undermined by misunderstanding of questions, inability to describe, explain, interpret, offer logical arguments or illustrations and specific examples to qualify their answers.
“Better answers were seen in parts of questions that are more direct. Some candidates rely on mnemonics in order to recall facts,” he said.
Mr Odongo also said some zero scores were recorded in many papers.
“One of those candidates decided to just copy out questions several times in one of the papers, while another wrote “Dear Mr Examiner. You are still wasting time on me when there are more serious candidates?”. After writing “Now listen to my story” he wrote a short poem starting with “I am the stone the builder refused….”. He then listed names of some famous musicians and their songs. Apart from scoring zero, this performance could indicate an underlying problem,” he said.
In sciences, evidence of theoretical teaching with little practical experience given to the candidates was observed at many centres.
As a result, Mr Odongo said, candidates who performed poorly showed inability to follow instructions and procedures during the practical examinations, failure to accurately record data or even make meaning of any of the data recorded.
“They had difficulty in writing the language of Chemistry using the correct chemical symbols and balanced equations. Whereas the skill of dissection is essential in Biology, some candidates did not carry out this task on the specimens provided as required by the questions but presented text book drawings. This may indicate the teachers in the schools where this happened may not have exposed the candidates to this skill that they will need should they, in future, have an opportunity to pursue Biological science- based courses,” he said.
Mr Odongo said cases of malpractice at this level have remained low. The reported ones have been mainly external assistance in Mathematics, Biology and Computer studies.
In accordance with Section 4 (3) of the UNEB Act, 2021, the Board, has withheld results of 113 candidates, and will accord the affected candidates a fair hearing before passing a final verdict.
