On 4 November, trainees at St. Mark’s Teachers College, Kigari, were taking the Christian Religious Education component of the Diploma in Teacher Education when the KNEC e‑assessment platform became inaccessible, preventing many from completing the paper.

The exam was scheduled from 1 pm to 4 pm on the TECBA system, with instructions that candidates ensure their devices are charged and connected to the internet, and that no extra time would be granted.

KNEC’s 2024 e‑assessment rules place most technical responsibilities on the institution, requiring licensed software and a dedicated offline server to run assessments without internet reliance, meaning a fault can arise at several points beyond the candidate’s control.

Following the outage, candidates protested the disruption, and police were deployed to the college to prevent the situation from escalating.

KNEC has not yet released incident logs or a technical report, so the precise cause of the platform collapse remains unverified.

If the interruption leads to a resit, trainees would need to pay KES 7,200 for the supplementary sitting and an additional KES 5,000 for a practicum referral, according to the council’s fee schedule.

The council’s chief executive, David Njengere, has described the shift to fully online diploma assessments as part of a broader modernisation effort aimed at competency‑based learning.

KNEC previously urged school principals in a 2024 circular to ready ICT infrastructure for both school‑based and final assessments via its e‑assessment portal.