With students across the Caribbean questioning the results released by the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC), that organisation has responded by saying that pupils have the option of querying their grades through a long-established procedure.
“If candidates have questions regarding their results, CXC® has a long-established process in place for addressing these concerns,” CXC posted on social media.
“Candidates who have questions about an Absent or Ungraded result, can submit a Query. If there is a question about a grade and the candidate wishes to have a script re-examined, they may submit a request for a Review,” the organisation said.
CXC released the results of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) on Tuesday.
However, many schools, teachers, parents, and students, from across the Caribbean, have come forward to contest those results.
Guyana’s Ministry of Education has already expressed it dissatisfaction with the apparent poor grading of students at the 2020 CSEC and CAPE examinations. Education Minister Priya Manickchand has already spoken to the Registrar of CXC and has expressed her concerns.
The complaints by students, parents and teachers, backed by statistics range from:
– Discrepancies in teachers’ projected grades and CXC final awards being significant in the results of many students.
– Maximum SBA scores having been attained by students who believe strongly that they answered the multiple-choice questions (many of which were questions repeated from previous years) correctly and yet they received poor grades.
– students of schools that have been historically performing optimally in these examinations have been awarded poor grades at this year’s CSEC and CAPE results which represent a stark deviation from the norm. Nothing else in those schools have changed including the teachers.
– the same students in year one CAPE who did excellently, scored poorly in year two.
– Schools which submitted all of the SBAs within the timeframe and received confirmation emails from CXC and received an ungraded result in some subject areas.
– There were unacceptable grades for Integrated Mathematics, Pure Maths papers one and two and Caribbean Studies at many schools
A petition is already circulating with candidates, parents and even teachers from all across the Caribbean calling for a review of the grades.
According to CXC’s “Query and Review” Process, students must pay to have their grades reviewed:
“If you have questions about an absent or ungraded result, you may submit a query. If you have questions about your grade and would like to have a script re-examined you may submit a request for a review. Queries are free and the cost per review is USD $30.00,” CXC said.
CXC reminded candidates that “a review of your script may result in your overall Grade either increasing, decreasing or remaining the same. If your review results in an increase in your overall grade, you will be refunded the review fee.”
Students have 30 days to decide their next step.
“Candidates should note that the deadline for submission of Queries and Review requests is Friday, October 23, 2020.”
