The Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education (UACE) results for 2023 have been released, showing an improved performance by candidates compared to 2023.
Releasing the results on Thursday, the Uganda National Examinations Board Executive Director, Mr Dan Odongo, said of the 109,488 candidates who sat the exams in 2023, 99.1% qualified for the award of the UACE. Under the current regulations, a candidate requires a Subsidiary level pass in a Principal level subject to qualify.
“University admissions to degree courses have, up to date, been considering 2 Principal level passes as the minimum requirement. If this consideration is maintained, 80,643 (73.7%) qualify to be admitted, compared to 67,815 (70.3%) in 2022,” Odongo said.
“This is consistent with the fact that there was better overall performance and a significant increase in entries for the examination in 2023. In cases where one Principal and two Subsidiary passes levels are considered for admission to other tertiary institutions, 90.7% of the candidates will qualify. This is better when compared to 2022 with 89.3%,” he said.
According to UNEB, although female candidates were fewer in number than the male candidates, proportionally, they performed better than their male counterparts in the 2023 exams.
“The percentage passes at the upper levels (3P and 2P) are higher, while percentage passes at the lower levels and failure rate among female candidates are lower than for the males. This has been the observed trend in the last three years,” Odongo said.
In terms of subjects, Maths, CRE, History and General Paper recorded good performance, with subjects such as Biology, which recorded low grades in 2022, also registering fair performance.
“Examiners reported improvement in the quality of candidates’ work, with higher mean scores in many subject areas where performance has been reported to have improved. Notable has been Biology, where performance has been rather poor in the past years. The core science subjects continue to show lower than desired principal performance levels.
The factors responsible for this state of affairs have been reported by UNEB during earlier releases of UACE 2023 results. They include teaching theoretically, with candidates lacking in practical skills to perform experiments, record and interpret their results. Questions based on practical experience posed problems as a result,” he said.
Professor Celestino Obua,the UNEB Chairperson, said entries for Sciences at UÁCE continue to be lower than for Humanities.
“It is gratifying though that the numbers are going up. However, we continue to see a low percentage of the female Candidates at this level offering Mathematics and Science combinations. The paradox, Honourable Minister. is that the girls who offer the STEM subjects perform well, if not better than the bovs. Why then do the girls shy away from these subjects?,” he said.
A total of 110,553 candidates registered for the 2023 UACE examination from 2,102 centres compared to 97,890 candidates from 1,969 centres in 2022. This is an increase of 12,663 candidates (12.9%).
Of these, 47,226 (42.7%) were females and 63,339 (57.3%) were males. Candidates who appeared for the examination were 109,488, compared to 96,557 in 2022, an increase of 12,931 candidates (13.4%). Of these, 46,860 (42.8%) were females and 62,628 (57.2%)