The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) has quietly slipped a decisive change into the 2025 exam season: every Grade 6 and Grade 9 learner will now shade neat circles on Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets instead of drawing the familiar horizontal lines to record answers.
The reform covers both the Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) and the Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) slated for late October.
In a circular released on 24 June 2025, the Council said the redesigned OMR sheets have already been uploaded to the Competency-Based Assessment (CBA) portal alongside full sample papers and subject-by-subject cover pages.
Teachers have been urged to download the materials immediately and drill learners on “proper, clean shading” to avoid scanning errors during marking.
The timetable remains unchanged: rehearsal day falls on Friday, 24 October, with the first written papers beginning Monday, 27 October 2025. KPSEA candidates will sit Mathematics in the opening session, while KJSEA Grade 9 learners tackle English Language simultaneously on their own timetable.
KNEC says it posted KJSEA sample papers on https://cba.knec.ac.ke as far back as January to give schools a six-month head start.
The shift to circles standardizes Kenya’s basic-education assessments with global OMR conventions and cuts scanning time by “well over 30 percent,” a move officials hope will eliminate the post-exam bottlenecks that dogged the first CBC cohorts.
Why the fuss over circles?
OMR scanners read uniform shapes faster and more accurately than irregular lines. Examiners complained that faint or slanted lines on last year’s scripts triggered thousands of manual verifications.
Circles – shaded dark and contained within a defined boundary – slash that risk.
What schools should do now
- Download the new KPSEA and KJSEA sample papers, cover pages and OMR sheets from the CBA portal (cba.knec.ac.ke) and run several mock tests.
- Emphasise heavy, even shading with HB or 2B pencils; pen marks and partial shading can still trigger rejection by the scanner, KNEC warns.
- Brief parents early: the answer-sheet format is different, but the syllabus and examination dates are not.
Roughly 1.3 million Grade 6 pupils and just under one million Grade 9 learners sat national CBC assessments last year – a similar head-count is forecast for 2025 if enrolment trends hold.
