RANKING SECONDARY SCHOOLS AND STUDENTS IN NATIONAL EXAMINATIONS: THE EFFECT ON PROMOTION RATES AND PERFORMANCE TRENDS IN SCHOOLS IN KENYA

This study sought to investigate the effect of ranking upper secondary schools and students in national examinations on students' promotion rates and on the schools' performance trends. A descriptive survey design was used and secondary schools in Kakamega south district formed the study population. The study sample consisted of 75 secondary schools stratified according to performance into low, average and top ranked categories. The sample size consisted of 36 schools (12 from each performance category) selected by simple random sampling. Reliability was established by use of test retest technique. Data on promotion rates revealed that, the low ranked schools had promotion rates of 0.990 for form I-II, 0.997 for form II-III and 0.958 for form III-IV. The average ranked schools had promotion rates of 0.984 for form I-II, 0.981 for form II-III and 0.959 while the top ranked schools had promotion rates of 1.00 for form I-II, 0.967 for form II-III and 0.882 for form III-IV. On performance trends, there was no significant difference in the performance of individual schools during the four years but there was significant difference in performance among the different categories of schools.