Education Ministry explains Schools Performance Rankings

THE DEPUTY MINISTER OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION (PROF PUAL MAVIMA):

I would like to say the quality of number of subject per centre is the criterion used to rank all centres per examination session.

Only school candidates are considered for ranking. For a centre to be considered for ranking, it should have a minimum of 21 or more candidates.

Ranking of centres considers the quality of subject passes per each centre in the following ways:

 
At Ordinary level:
For a candidate to be included in the computation, they must have passed 5 subjects or more.

The passing grade is C or better.

The computer programme takes into account the numerical value for each grade as follows


ALPHABETIC GRADE NUMERICAL VALUE
A-5, B-4, C-3

The above figures shows the numerical values used in the computation of average subject values for ranking purpose.

For every centre, all the subject grades in numerical values are added up by the computer to come up with a total value which is then divided by the number of subjects per centre to give an average value for the centre.

Each centre is ranked according to its average value. The higher the average subject value, the higher the position of the centre on the rank order listing.

 
At Advanced Level.

For every candidate to be considered in the computation, the candidate should have passed two or more subjects at Grade E or better.

The numeric value for each grade is as follows

ALPHABETIC GRADE NUMERIC VALUE
A-5, B-4, C-3, D-2, E-1

The computation of average subject values is similar to that at Ordinary level.


Grade 7:
The number of subjects computed for ranking purposes is 4.

The minimum passing grade is Grade 6. This gives a maximum total of 24 points for the 4 subjects passed.

The average subject values which are passes and are computed form point 1 to 6 for all candidates provides the quality of passes per centre for ranking purposes.

It is important to note that the percentage pass rate per centre is just an indicator on how candidates performed during the examinations based on the quality of passes per centre.

I want to acknowledge the concern of the hon. member because, what we are basically doing is a summative ranking, which means that we are only considering the results at the end.

So, it is summative in that sense. We have not made considerations to the input for O-Level for example.

I hear that he is basically saying that that ranking is unfair in the sense that Anderson, when they recruit their form ones, they are only taking the top, maybe those with fours and fives in terms of the aggregate units; whereas a school in Mukoba is maybe taking some people with 36 units.

So, I appreciate that and we as a Ministry are aware of that shortcoming and we would like to look at it.

But, having said that, we are basically saying, we need to just improve the performance of our schools across the board at all levels

Grade 7, Forms 4 and 6 so that we reduce the failure rates that we are seeing right now.

Otherwise, I acknowledge the concerns of the hon. member.
 
Again, I want to acknowledge that the issue of school size is another variable that maybe we should factor in.

But, having said that, there are a lot of schools that match Mpopoma High School in terms of their numbers but they are ranked much higher; maybe in the top ten.

We are looking at Marist Brothers Nyanga for example and Goromonzi High School. So, we have big schools that are also performing well and we have smaller schools that are performing well and smaller schools that are performing badly.

But, I also acknowledge the existence of the school size as a variable, which maybe in the future we should make reference to.