By Spy Uganda
Uganda National Examinations Board has today’s afternoon released results for the year 2020 Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) in accordance with the mandate of the Board under Section 4(1)(b) of the UNEB Act, No 1 of 2021.
The released exams are those that were conducted between 1st March and 6th April 2021 not December as it used to be due to the global Covid-19 pandemic.
According to UNEB’s statistics, Candidature decreased by 4,324 (-1.3%) from 337,720 in 2019 to 333,396. Of these, 148,128 (44.4%) were USE beneficiaries.
Releasing the exams at state house Nakasero, UNEB’s Executive Secretary, Dan.N.Odongo revealed that the board registered 166,744 (50.01%) male candidates and 166,652 (49.99%) females which makes a difference of 92 more males than females.
Taking you back a while, in 2019, the number of females had surpassed that of the males by 398. In 2020, 330,592 candidates (165,251 males and 165,341 females) appeared for the examination compared to 333,060 candidates who appeared for the examination in 2019-which makes a decrease of 2,468 (-0.7%) candidates.
According to Odongo, absenteeism of candidates has continued to drop over the last five years.
“A total of 519 Special Needs Education (SNE) candidates (252 males; 267 females) registered for the 2020 UCE examination compared to 358 in 2019. These consisted of the blind (29), those with low vision (104), the deaf (78), the dyslexics (43) and physically handicapped (76). There were 189 others with other forms of disability that only needed to be given extra time,” said Odongo.
On performance, Odongo said that there was better performance overall, compared to 2019, with 311,233 (4,309 more) candidates passing compared to 306,924 who passed the examination in 2019.
“There is an overall improvement in performance in the large entry subjects except in Geography, Chemistry and Biology, although Biology showed a slight improvement at the Distinction 2 level. Worth noting with concern is the overall pass levels for Science subjects where nearly half of the candidates have not achieved the minimum Pass 8 level. Chemistry remains the worst done subject,” Odongo noted.
