Education Minister Sonia Parag’s claim that Guyana has exceeded the Caribbean regional benchmark in primary education has sparked serious questions about the credibility of the government’s latest education triumph, given that Guyana does not participate in the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment (CPEA), the only common regional examination designed to measure primary school achievement across participating territories.
The minister’s declaration, made during Friday’s release of the 2026 National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) results, has shifted attention away from the government’s celebration of record pass rates and toward a more fundamental issue: on what objective basis can Guyana claim to have surpassed a regional benchmark when its students do not sit the region’s standardised primary assessment?
Unless the Ministry of Education publicly discloses the methodology used to reach that conclusion, the claim risks being viewed as unsubstantiated and raises broader concerns about transparency in the reporting of educational outcomes.
Speaking at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, Parag announced that the 2026 NGSA cohort had produced the strongest results in the examination’s history, with 20 students tying for first place after each attained the maximum score of 484.52 marks across Mathematics, English, Science and Social Studies.
She further stated that after receiving the results from the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), the Ministry requested a comparison with students from other Caribbean territories.
“The comparison showed that Guyana exceeded the regional benchmark,” Parag declared, adding, “I am proud to say that Guyana’s results have exceeded the regional benchmark.”
That assertion, however, sits uneasily against the structure of primary education assessment in the Caribbean.
Guyana does not administer the CPEA, which CXC introduced in 2012 specifically to establish a common regional standard for measuring primary school achievement. Instead, Guyana continues to administer its own National Grade Six Assessment, a locally developed examination whose content, weighting, scoring and level of difficulty are determined nationally. The distinction is critical.
The CPEA was created precisely because national examinations differed significantly from one territory to another, making meaningful regional comparisons difficult. According to CXC, the assessment provides a common measure of student achievement, applies shared performance standards across participating countries and enables direct comparisons of learning outcomes throughout the Caribbean.
Earlier this year, CXC strengthened that framework by introducing revised regional benchmarks, standards and performance criteria aligned with regional and international curricula to ensure consistency in measuring student performance. Guyana remains outside that system.
Consequently, there is no publicly available evidence explaining how Guyana’s NGSA results were compared with CPEA outcomes or what statistical methodology was employed to conclude that Guyana had surpassed a regional benchmark. To date, the Ministry has not released a technical report or assessment framework detailing how the comparison was conducted.
The absence of that information becomes even more significant when viewed alongside the dramatic improvements in NGSA pass rates over recent years.
Government officials have repeatedly celebrated sharp increases in student performance, particularly in Mathematics, English and Science, presenting the gains as evidence that learning outcomes have improved substantially.
However, the NGSA differs fundamentally from the CPEA in one important respect. It is designed, administered and controlled nationally. Unlike the CPEA, which operates under common regional standards, the NGSA’s examination content changes annually, with local authorities determining the questions, their weighting and the overall level of difficulty.
That means improvements in pass rates, by themselves, do not necessarily establish that students have mastered significantly more content. Changes in examination difficulty, question selection or scoring thresholds can also influence national outcomes.
The Mathematics results illustrate why those questions are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
In 2024, approximately 40 per cent of candidates achieved a passing grade. One year later, that figure had risen to 55 per cent, an extraordinary 15-percentage-point increase. Similar double-digit improvements were recorded in English and Science.
Such gains would ordinarily be accompanied by evidence of major, system-wide educational interventions capable of transforming learning outcomes across an entire cohort within a single year. To date, no detailed evidence has been presented demonstrating reforms of that scale sufficient to explain such dramatic increases.
That has fuelled calls for greater transparency surrounding the construction of the examination, the maintenance of assessment standards and the statistical basis upon which the government attributes improved pass rates to improved learning.
It is precisely to avoid such uncertainty that CXC established the CPEA. By requiring participating territories to assess students using the same examination and the same performance standards, the regional assessment provides an objective benchmark against which educational progress can be measured.
Guyana’s continued reliance on a separate national examination means that claims of regional superiority demand a higher level of public explanation than has so far been provided.
Until the Ministry releases the methodology underpinning its comparison and demonstrates that the NGSA results are directly comparable with CPEA benchmarks, the government’s declaration that Guyana has surpassed the Caribbean remains questionable.
