CBC Strand-Based Grading Explained for Teachers

When the first Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) results came out, a lot of parents — and more than a few teachers — saw a grade like "EE1" or "AE2" and had no idea whether that was good or bad. It's a fair reaction: under 8-4-4, an E meant you'd failed. Under CBC, EE is the highest grade there is. If you're a class teacher trying to explain this to a confused parent, or you're filling in a report card for the first time and second-guessing every entry, this is the plain-language version.

Strands and sub-strands, not "topics"

Every learning area (subject) in the CBC curriculum, as designed by KICD (the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development), is broken down into strands — broad content areas — and each strand is broken down further into sub-strands, the specific, teachable units you actually cover lesson by lesson. Mathematics in Grade 3, for example, has a strand like "Measurement," with sub-strands underneath it such as "Length" or "Time." A learner isn't graded on "Mathematics" as one lump subject — they're assessed sub-strand by sub-strand, against specific learning outcomes KICD has already written out for that exact sub-strand.

This is the part that trips people up coming from 8-4-4: there's no single end-of-term Mathematics mark. There's a grade for how well the learner did on Length, a separate one for Time, and so on — each judged against what that specific sub-strand expects a learner at that level to be able to do.

The four performance levels

Instead of a percentage or a letter grade, CBC (also referred to as CBE, Competency-Based Education) uses four qualitative performance levels, confirmed by KNEC (the Kenya National Examinations Council) as the official framework:

• Exceeding Expectation (EE) — the learner performs at or above what's expected for the sub-strand, consistently and independently.
• Meeting Expectation (ME) — the learner follows instructions and completes most of what's expected for the sub-strand.
• Approaching Expectation (AE) — the learner attempts the work but is inconsistent, and needs more practice to get there.
• Below Expectation (BE) — the learner shows significant gaps and needs direct support to make progress.

At national assessment level (KPSEA in Grade 6, KJSEA in Grade 9), each of these four bands is further split into two sub-levels — EE1/EE2, ME1/ME2, AE1/AE2, BE1/BE2 — giving an 8-point scale where 8 is the highest and 1 is the lowest. For day-to-day classroom grading, most teachers work directly with the four main bands rather than the finer 8-point split, unless their school specifically asks for it.

The single most important thing to get across to a worried parent: AE is not a fail. It means the learner is on their way and needs a bit more support — not that they've done badly. CBC deliberately moved away from ranking learners against each other; the question is only whether a specific learner is progressing toward the expected competency, at their own pace.

How you actually grade a sub-strand: the rubric

A rubric is the tool that makes this practical instead of subjective. For each learning outcome under a sub-strand, a good rubric describes, in specific and observable terms, what a learner's work looks like at each of the four performance levels. "Correctly measures and records the length of five objects using a ruler, without help" is an EE-level descriptor — specific, observable, and easy to check against what the learner actually did. A vague rubric ("understands measurement") is much harder to grade consistently, which is exactly why rubrics that follow KICD's own curriculum designs matter — they keep grading consistent from one class, and one teacher, to the next. For the full range of assessment methods and tools, and a step-by-step way to record them, see our guide to CBC assessment in Kenya.

How this compares to 8-4-4

Under 8-4-4, a learner is graded almost entirely on exams — CATs, mid-terms, end-terms — scored as a percentage or letter grade, building toward KCSE. It's simple to grade and easy to rank, but it only tells you where a learner landed on one day, not how they're actually progressing. CBC's strand-based, rubric-driven approach takes more setup, but it gives a far more specific, useful picture of exactly what a learner can and can't yet do — which is also exactly why it takes real software, not a spreadsheet built for percentages, to grade properly.

Where this fits into the bigger picture

School-based, strand-level grading isn't disconnected from the national assessments — it feeds into them. At Grade 6, school-based assessment from Grades 4, 5 and 6 makes up about 60% of a learner's KPSEA score, and the national KPSEA assessment makes up the remaining 40%. At Grade 9, the KJSEA summative assessment counts for 60% of the final score, the learner's KPSEA result contributes 20%, and school-based assessment from Grades 7 and 8 contributes the other 20%. In other words, the strand-by-strand grading you do all term, every term, is a real, counted part of a learner's eventual outcome — not just an internal record.

Doing this by hand doesn't scale

Multiply this out across a full class, every strand and sub-strand, every term, and it's easy to see why so many teachers end up spending evenings filling in rubric after rubric by hand. This is exactly the gap DARASA's CBC gradebook is built to close — grade each learner by strand and sub-strand using the real KICD curriculum designs, generate CBC schemes of work automatically instead of typing them out from scratch, and let DARASA's AI marking scheme generator help with the exam side too. It supports 8-4-4 grading in the same app, for the schools still running both.

If you're filling in CBC report cards by hand right now, it's worth trying a system built around how CBC actually works, rather than one repurposed from an old percentage-based gradebook. Start your free 7-day trial — no card required.