Between November 12th and 28th, the
students at my school have been taking their UNEB exams. UNEB stands for Uganda
National Examination Board, so it’s technically only the body that releases the
exams not the exams themselves. But I will follow normal practice and simply
call them UNEB. For those in senior six (the last year of secondary, like the
U.S. 12th grade, see the previous blog where I compare the two
education systems), this was the climax of their secondary educations. Universities
will use this as the primary (almost exclusive with the exception of sports and
disabilities scholarships) qualification for admissions. Term grades do not
really exist in most secondary schools, meaning that these exams are the only
real (academic) indicator by which universities will judge the students. They
function as a cumulative final exam for the last two years at secondary (called
Advanced-level or simply A-level) instead of an aptitude indicator like the
SATs or ACTs in the United States and thus are the way in which universities
measure whether the students have in fact learned or merely slept through the
last two years of classes. There are in fact exams multiple times a year in
each grade, but these are more like pre-tests to practice for the UNEB exams –
along with being used by the school internally to monitor whether the student
should advance to the next grade. These are never really important for the universities.
There were
two exams a day – one in the morning, the other the afternoon – over that three
week period. Not all the students took each exam, but only those that they were
taking classes for (following a national exam schedule which must include every
class offered in the country, even those that my school doesn’t offer). Classes
for S6 (senior six) ended three weeks before this day, in order to give them
sufficient time to prepare. This meant that half the school – remember that my
school has two grades, S5 and S6, so one grade is half the school – was closed
for the better part of a month and a half.
I won’t go
into the details of the exam style here but suffice to say that most exams are a
series of essays for which the students have 3 hours to complete. In math and
physics, these are problems, and in subjects like history, they’re essays. They
are graded by teachers around the country based on a points system. In a
history essay about the French Revolution, for example, they may be expected to
make certain points, each of which they receive a point for. These then
determine their score. This system sometimes leads to more
memorization-oriented learning where they are told to make certain points on a
given topic. This contrasts with say the SAT writing style, which gives an
unknown, sometimes more philosophical topic (I believe for me, the topic was
something about beauty) on which the student can say whatever, and how the
students say it– the writing style, organization, etc. matter. Or with AP tests
– say history AP tests given that they are closes direct parallel to the
history UNEB exam in the sense of a national exam to determine proficiency in
the topic of history – where in the essay portion, they ask very similar
questions about a historical event, but for which the emphasis is on making a
good argument, not certain points. In math, I do not find much of a difference
given that math problems by their very nature require a certain degree of
analysis.
The exams
for S4 – to determine whether to students will go onto the second part of
secondary and for those about to finish primary schooling – are each earlier,
but as they weren’t at my school, I won’t talk about them here.
Anyone who looks at the calendar
will quickly realize that UNEB is over. As a matter of fact, both the school is
closed and the holiday has started (it’ll be a funny thing to call it Winter
Break given that December through February is the dry season and the warmest
time of year in Uganda). I wanted to keep people updated about what life was
like here. I was going to write this blog before during the actual exams but
was too busy.
The S6s have graduated from
secondary, with the ceremony for my school on Nov 24th. I’ll post
pictures of it later. At the same time, the S5s became S6s, which here happens
in the few weeks before vacation, not immediately upon coming back like in the
U.S. Once their exam scores come back, S6s will apply for universities, which
start in August. This gives graduates – or any university-bound graduates – an
eight-month break. This is really a product of the transition of calendars. Ugandan
universities put their largest holiday, like schools in the United States, between
May and August; whereas, for primary and secondary schools, the major holiday is
between November and February. When going between the two like for graduates of
secondary going to university, five months or so sort of fall through the
cracks. Otherwise, the S5s like any other grade in primary and secondary have
gone home and will come back in February to complete the next grade.
