A total of 353,154 candidates who sat the 2024 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exams scored a mean grade of D plain and below.
The number represents nearly a third of the 958,928 candidates whose results were released on Thursday by Education Cabinet Secretary Migosi Ogamba.
This number of students may not enrol for formal education training, but will now join technical institutions for artisan courses.
The number of grade D plain and below, however, reduced from 369, 311 that were recorded in 2023 KCSE.
In the 2024 KCSE, a total of 153,334b scored a mean grade of D Plain of which 79,832 were girls while 73,501 were boys.
A total of 151,487 candidates posted a mean grade of D minus in the 2024 KCSE of which 72,181 were girls while 79,306 were boys.
Some 48,333 candidates scored a mean grade of E of which 20,112 girls against 28,221.
Comparatively, in the 2023 KSCE results, 48,174 candidates posted a mean grade of E of which 19,960 were girls while 28,214 were boys.
An analysis by KNEC on how each category of schools performed shows that there were only 161 E grades in National schools while Extra County had 115 E grades.
County Schools had 1,906 Grade E while Sub County schools posted 40,369 E grades across the country while private schools recorded 5,782 Grade E.
The number represented an increase from the 2023 KCSE when 1216 candidates scored a mean grade of A plain.
Statistics from the Kenya National Examinations Council show that in the 2014 KCSE, a total of 1,137 boys scored a straight A compared to 556 girls.
In the 2023 KCSE, 825 boys scored A plain compared to 391 girls.
The results show that the number of A plain grade increased by 0.18 per cent.
This shows that there was an increase in the number of A grades by both boys and girls in the 2024 KCSE.
The 2024 KCSE results released on Thursday also shows that National schools dominated the A plain grades.
Of the 1693 A plain grades, 1,375 came from national schools representing 81.22 per cent.
Extra County Schools produced 163 A grades representing 9.63 per cent of the total number of A grades.
County schools had four A plain grades while private schools had 142 A plain grades.
According to KNEC there were 7,743 A minus grades of which 2,840 were girls and 4,903 boys.
This represented an increase of 0.8 per cent compared to the 2023 KCSE when 7254 candidates scored A minus.
