Common Mistakes Teachers Make When Setting CBC Exams

Setting a good CBC exam is a skill that develops with practice — and like any skill, it comes with a handful of predictable slip-ups along the way. None of these are signs of a bad teacher; they're the natural result of writing dozens of questions under time pressure, often the night before a paper is due. Here are the four that show up most often, and how to catch them before the paper goes to print.

1. Bare Fact-Recall Stems Instead of Scenario-Wraps

The mistake: writing "Name two sources of water" instead of putting that same question inside a real situation a learner might actually encounter. Genuine KNEC-style questions almost always open with a real-life actor or situation — a farmer, a learner conducting an experiment, a community facing a problem — rather than a bare question standing on its own.

Why it happens: scenario-wraps take more time to write, and under deadline pressure it's faster to just ask the fact directly.

The fix: for each question, ask "what real situation would require someone to use this fact?" and build one or two sentences of context around it before you ask the question itself. It doesn't need to be elaborate — a single well-chosen sentence usually does the job.

2. Mismatching Command Verbs to the Wrong Grade Band

The mistake: asking a Grade 3 pupil to "analyse" something, or asking a Grade 9 learner to merely "name" something they should be explaining or comparing. Each grade band has command verbs that match its expected cognitive level — Lower Primary sits at Remember/basic Understand with verbs like name, identify, match; Junior School sits at Apply/Analyse with verbs like explain why, compare, investigate.

Why it happens: it's easy to reach for a verb that "sounds right" for an exam without checking whether it matches what learners at that age are actually capable of doing.

The fix: before writing a question, decide which band you're setting for and choose the verb from that band's list first — let the verb shape the question, not the other way round.

3. Poorly-Formed MCQ Distractors

The mistake: writing four options where three are obviously implausible, or where the correct answer looks different in form from the distractors — for instance, the right answer is a full sentence while the other three options are single words. Either error makes the correct answer guessable without any real knowledge of the content.

Why it happens: writing three genuinely plausible wrong answers is harder than writing the one correct answer, so the remaining options often get filled in quickly with whatever comes to mind.

The fix: distractors should be the same grammatical form as the correct answer, and each one should represent a real, common misconception or error — not a random unrelated fact. If you can't think of a plausible wrong answer, that's often a sign the concept itself has only one obvious answer and might not make a good MCQ at all.

4. Setting a Question With No Anchor in the Actual Curriculum Design

The mistake: setting a question because it appears in a textbook, without checking whether it's actually anchored to a learning outcome in the curriculum design for that grade. CBC's curriculum design documents specify outcomes and competencies — a verb, a topic, a context — not just a pool of facts. A question is only fair if it's testing something the design actually asked learners to be able to do at that grade, not simply "anything a textbook happened to cover."

Why it happens: textbooks are the most accessible reference when you're setting a paper quickly, and it's easy to assume that if it's in the book, it's fair game.

The fix: before including a question, check it against the actual learning outcome it's meant to assess — not just against a textbook chapter. If you can't point to the specific outcome a question is testing, it's worth reconsidering whether that question belongs on the paper.

The Takeaway

None of these four mistakes require rewriting your whole approach to exam-setting — they're catchable with a second pass through a finished paper, checking each question against its grade band's verbs, its scenario, its distractors, and its curriculum anchor. Building that check into your routine, even briefly, is usually enough to catch most of what would otherwise slip through.