KAMPALA – The subjects of English, Commerce and History recorded poor performance in the 2019 Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) results.
According to the UCE results released on Friday, January 31, 2020, most students were unable to interpret questions in the three subjects.
This, UNEB Executive Secretary Dan Odongo, attributed to poor training by teachers, whom he said only encouraged students to cram concepts to pass exams.
“By the time you fail English then how will you interpret questions in other subjects,” Mr Odongo said.
In her remarks, Education minister Janet Museveni said that the English subject has degenerated into encouraging learners to cram passages without genuinely learning the language.
“Students today use highly sounding words to impress, some of them don’t even know the meanings. All these are aimed at making leaners pass without making them understand. This needs to stop as it is not helping our students,” Ms Museveni said.
Nevertheless, girls performed better than boys in English language.
“Females have performed better than Males in the English language. This has always happened over the years. However, the boys manage to make their way around in other subjects and beat the girls,” he added.
Mr Odongo also said there was despite a general improvement in the science subjects like Biology, Agriculture and Chemistry.
Of the 337,720 students who sat the UCE 2019 exams, 144,256 (42.7%) were from USE schools.
UNEB also revealed that failure rate dropped to 7.8 percent, from 12.8 percent in the previous year.
“Overall performance improved with 92.2% passing compared to 87.2% in the previous years while failure rate dropped significantly from 12.8% to 7.8%,” he said
He said that 92.2 of the candidates who sat for the exams are able to proceed to the next level of education which is Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education (UACE) or A-Level.
