The First Lady and Minister of Education and Sports (MoES) Janet Kataha Museveni has officially released the 2020 Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) results.
The results in which a total of 749, 761 candidates from 14,300 centers were registered, have been released at State House Entebbe in an exclusive ceremony attended by top leaders in Uganda’s Education sector.
2020 candidates sat their PLE exams in March 2021 after spending the majority of 2020 in lockdown and away from home after President Museveni closed schools in March, 2020.
The Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB), the body assigned to exam the students noted that the female candidates performed better than the male in English Language but the reverse was true in the other subjects Social Studies (SST), Mathematics and Basic Science.
Results of some 2,220 pupils were withheld pending investigations after the examiners got pointers that the said pupils could have cheated.
UNEB further reported that a number of schools registered pupils who were not yet candidates to sit for the Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) last year. The revelation was made by the UNEB chairperson Prof Mary Okwakol who confirmed that the examinations body experienced an unusual surge in numbers of candidates.
Okwakol said that the number of registered candidates went up with a larger percentage that has never been seen, and this was suspicious especially since the country had been hampered with COVID-19, and pupils, mostly girls could have been affected with the long span outside school.
“Statistics on registration show that the number of registered candidates went up with a larger percentage than ever before. This was contrary to expectation and so the Board undertook a study to find out the reason for this increase,” Okwakol said during the release of PLE exams at State House Entebbe.
