The Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand and a team of senior education officials on Wednesday engaged the Registrar of Caribbean Examination Council (CXC), Dr Wayne Wesley and his team on a number of queries made officially to the examining body consequent to the release of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) results.
During the interactive session, the Ministry of Education Dr. Wesley explained why some students performed poorly at this year’s examinations as the Ministry of Education queried the weighting of the examination papers, and how the grades from the Paper One (1) and the School-Based Assessment (SBA) were applied to the subject profiles, and therefore affected the overall composite score and the final grade assigned.
In a statement, the Ministry said that the intervention of the Minister of Education and her team that 14 schools which had received ungraded results have since received acceptable grades. The Ministry of Education was assured that the remaining queries at the CXC should be answered within the next two weeks.
“Even after profound query, the Ministry remains unclear about why students appeared to have performed poorer in paper one of various exams,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, the Ministry’s team was adamant that CXC should not have changed the format of the examination abruptly adding that this would have had a negative impact on the students.
Despite that position, the Ministry made it clear that “some errors occurred on the part of the schools which contributed to the dilemma of the students. For example, in some cases no SBAs submissions were made, schools submitted SBAs scores late, and the cover pages for SBAs were missing.”
The Ministry said it intends to monitor closely the SBA process through the development of a more “rigid and elaborate protocol for the submission of same to CXC”.
Further, teachers will also be trained in the process of uploading SBAs scores which will be further examined by the Superintendent of Examinations before the final submission is made to CXC. The training sessions are aimed at apprising the teachers of the type of rating students should receive in the various profiles in order to receive the best grades in the various subject areas.
