Question 1

How to download past KCSE past papers with questions and answers

Accepted Answer

It is that time of the year when you need to prepare students to sit the national exams. You have covered your syllabus, administered topical assessment quizzes and tests to gauge your students and you now want to prepare them to tackle exam papers from yesteryears.

To get started, go the 'Home' view menu, select 'Tools' and then open the 'Past Papers' page. As shown in the image below, choose the KCSE year whose papers you want then select the subject to view questions and answers.

You can click the 'Questions/Answers' buttons to switch from viewing questions to answers and vice-versa.

When done, click 'Download PDF' to get a copy of the past papers on your computer.

Question 2

How to check a student's fee balance and generate their statement of accounts

Accepted Answer

A parent has just entered your office and needs you to print for them a 'Statement of Accounts' for their child showing invoices(debits) versus payments(credits) made. How do you do it?

The 'Balances' section is where you will find all this information. In additional to student fee balances it contains a summary report of current fee balances in your school. For example, you can check overall fee balance, current term balance, balances per year group, balances per votehead etc. You may want to click on 'Hide Insights' to momentarily hide the summary or scroll down the page to access the student balances table.

Search for the student whose balances you want to view then check the 'Balance' column of the table to view the amount. The system also shows the total amount invoiced, total amount paid and the date when balance was last updated on.

Click on 'View Statement' to see the student's comprehensive statement of accounts or to print and download the same in PDF.

Here is a sample of the 'Statement of Accounts' ${frame}Sample PDF file

Question 3

How to send exam results to parents via SMS using an Excel file

Accepted Answer

When students sit an exam you may to notify their parents on how they performed. Most schools will print result slips and give them to students to take home. However, some deceitful students may want to change their bad grades to appear like they did well in the exam or hide the slips altogether.

Sematime allows schools to send exam results to parents via SMS. Each parent receives a unique message showing what their student scored per subject, overall grade, position, etc.

Before we get started, please ensure that you have saved the exam results in an Excel file whose data format matches the template below. The first row is the column names followed by specific student details. ${frame}Exam results Excel file sample

| While the sample Excel file above has many important columns, Sematime only needs the following columns: student ID(admission number), student name, scores per subject & total marks or mean grade. Any other column provided will be included in the final message.

Once your Excel file is ready, go to the 'Messages' section on the menu and select the 'Exam results' option as highlighted in the image below. Proceed to drag-and-drop your Excel file onto the dotted area or click the 'Select Excel file' button to choose from y

Question 4

How to analyze past KCSE exam papers and predict topics likely to be tested

Accepted Answer

When sitting for the KCSE exams, a student usually has to prepare by reading through coursework content from Form 1 to Form 4. Considering that Kenya’s education curriculum for high schools has 15 subjects covering approximately 400 topics that’s really a lot of coursework to cover within a limited timeframe.

| We have analyzed 5,000+ past KCSE papers and Mock exams to show students what the most relevant and highly merited topics in each class are. This way students spend more time reading and mastering the topics that will get them the most marks and spend way less time on the less important ones - those that are hardly tested or those that account for the least amount of marks.

To get started, go the 'Home' view menu, select 'Tools' and then open the 'KCSE Analysis' page. As shown in the image below, choose the KCSE paper you wish to analyze.

There are three sections that we focus on:

Distribution of marks per class - here you get to see the contribution each class has made to the sum of all marks in the paper for the duration chosen.

Most valued topics - shows which topics contributed the most marks and questions in the duration chosen. From this section, it's clear which topics you want your students to master and be proficient in the most.

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Question 5

How to use the exam generator to create new exam papers

Accepted Answer

Three months have passed since the new term began, you have rigorously covered all the syllabus areas expected of you and you need to create the end of term exam papers before schools close for the holidays. Of course, you could create the papers manually and take a whole day while at it or you can let the Sematime Academics exams generator do all the heavy lifting for you.

| The exam generator tool takes away all the hassles of creating openner, mid-term or end of term exams by automating the entire process such that with just a few clicks you can have a fully fledged exam for your students to sit in just 5 minutes. It makes use of the 6,700+ 'Questions Bank' to give teachers a huge catalogue of questions to choose from.

Here is a sample exam paper generated by this tool. Isn't it great? ${frame}Exam results Excel file sample

To create a new exam paper, go to the 'Home' view menu and select 'Tools' then open the 'Exams Generator' section and click 'New Exam Paper'. See image below.

Start by filling up all the required exam paper details such as name of exam, duration, class, subject etc. Then click the 'Next' button.

The system will suggest some topics to generate questions

Question 6

How to add a few parent contacts manually one-by-one

Accepted Answer

There are times when you need to add one or two parents into your contacts. Of course, you can use an Excel file to save their contact details first then use the how to add parent contacts from an Excel file process but that is an overkill especially when you only need to add one contact and do it fast.

Login to your Sematime Messaging account, go to 'Contacts' on your menu and click the blue 'Add Contacts' button. The dialog window below will appear on your screen prompting you to choose the Excel file whose contacts you want to add. Disregard the 'Import from Excel option' and click on 'Add manually one by one' as shown in the image below.

Select the group to add the contacts to, or create one if need be, then input the student details and the parents phone number. Continue to add more contacts this way then close the dialog window when you are done.

| Sematime does not need you to prefix phone numbers using the country code unless you are saving a non-Kenyan phone number such as +255706129100.

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