Uneb reveals why performance in Arts dropped
Assessment body Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) examiners have revealed mistakes made by candidates in answering questions. Speaking before education minister Janet Museveni released results from the 2025 Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education (UACE) examinations, Uneb executive director Dan Odongo shared what examiners reported about approach and answering of questions.
Overall, Odongo noted that the performance of candidates has shown notable improvements in Mathematics, Chemistry, Agriculture, Geography and Economics. Other subjects with improvements are Biology and Literature in English, he added.
Uneb also reported “significant drops in levels of performance are noticeable in Entrepreneurship Education, Christian Religious Education, Fine Art and Physics.”
The executive director also revealed that “grades for the Science subjects have remarkably improved compared to the Humanities.”
So, what was the problem with arts (humanities). Uneb examiners blamed failure to grasp the main concepts in the questions.
“In the Humanities, the problems continue to be poor interpretation of questions due to misunderstanding of the key concepts that determine the expected responses,” Odongo noted.
“In History, for example, inadequate levels of analytical and evaluative skills, logical flow of content and with relevant examples were observed.”
He added that for Religious Education, “application-based tasks, especially those that require connections of the teachings in the Holy Books to everyday life situations continue to present a consistent problem.”
For Geography, the Uneb executive director further explained, examiners continue to report poor data analysis skills among candidates as they still find challenges in using the various statistical methods to explain geographical phenomena.
“Candidates are not relating theory to the environment. They had difficulties in relating fieldwork findings to the geography of the area and presenting a fair sketch map,” Odongo added.
For languages, Uneb noted that issues in grammar. “UNEB assesses knowledge and skills in a number of local languages at this level. Candidates are not grounded in grammar, ability to translate a passage into English coherently, proverbs, poetry and other cultural practices.”
You can see the list of Uganda’s 180 best performing schools with maximum 20 points in UACE 2025 Here.
