Parents and students who rushed to access the 2024 KCSE results were left disappointed as the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) portal went down soon after the release.
The portal crashed moments after Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Migos announced how to access the results. Some 965,512 candidates took their KCSE exams across 10,755 centers last year.
“This page isn’t working” read the error message displayed when one tried to click through the link.
However, in a tweet on X, KNEC stated that the portal was now fully functional and candidates were receiving their results.
"The minor delays in receiving feedback is due to the high number of requests being sent to the portal, of up to 300,000 hits per second," KNEC said.
Candidates had been asked to access individual results online through a link on the KNEC website (https://results.knec.ac.ke).
They were required to enter their index number and any of their names per their KCSE registration data. In his address, Ogemba advised any candidates with trouble accessing their results to call KNEC through the toll-free number 0800724900 or 0800721410.
Kenyans rushed to social media to express their frustrations over the delays in accessing the results.
Virginia Wahome, the Chief Principal of Kenya High School, has expressed concerns over delays in accessing KCSE results for their 382 candidates.
Speaking on the matter, Wahome noted that only half of the results have been successfully uploaded so far.
“The system is slow, and it’s taking more than 10 minutes to upload results for a single candidate,” she said, noting the challenges they are facing in processing the data.
Wahome also observed a significant change in the timing of the release of the results.
“In previous years, KCSE results were released before the Christmas holidays. However, this time, they were released after schools resumed for the first term,” she noted.
To expedite the process, the school has organized teachers into groups to handle the uploads more efficiently.
The move to access the secondary examination results through an online portal was first utilized during the release of the 2023 KCSE results, though a similar challenge was experienced then.
It was a shift from the past where Kenyans accessed results by sending a Short Message Service (SMS).
The shift from SMS was informed by concerns by the public who complained about receiving fake results.
The 2024 exam began on October 28 with 965,501 candidates sitting the assessment across 10,755 exam centres across the country.