Boys outshine girls as 2018 UCE exams are released

The 2018  Uganda Certificate of Education examination results released on Thursday afternoon have indicated that boys performed better than their female counterparts.

The results released indicated that 10.2% of the boys passed in division one, compared to 6.6% for the girls whereas in the second division, 18.1% (boys) passed compared to 13.9% for the girls.

According to the results, boys outsmarted their female counterparts at all the higher grades(from division one to division three) in the 2018 UCE exams.

The female candidates however performed better than their female counterparts in English language despite being outshined in all other entry subjects.

The UNEB Executive Secretary, Dan Odongo reported  that there was overall improvement in English, Christian Religious Education and Physics whereas there was also improvement at distinction level for Mathematics and Biology.

Odongo said that despite improvement in the English language, the skills of speech writing examined during the 2018 UCE exams proved difficult for majority of the candidates.

"They found difficulties in using correct protocol , correct spellings and using tenses correctly," Odongo told journalists.

He also noted that candidates found answering direct questions easier than inferring answers from passages  adding that the challenge of  language deficiency continued to reflect in performance in other subjects other than English language.

Sciences

The exams released on Thursday indicated that candidates continued experiencing problems in handling apparatus during the practical tests as well as marking, recording and drawing conclusions from those observations.

"Examiners have reported that the cause of these inadequacies lies in the fact that teachers dont integrate the teaching of the theory  and practicals," the UNEB Executive Secretary Dan Odongo said.

The results also indicated that there was an increase in the number of candidates to 330,721 compared to 320119 the previous year in 2017 indicating an increase by 3.2%.

According to the results, 27696 candidates passed in division one , 52706 in division two, 70,347 in division three,137058 in division four and 42,334 students failed.

The results indicated that the biggest number of students ,137,058(54%) passed in division four.