Minister of Education Priya Manickchand and team engaged the Registrar of Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) and team on Wednesday, October 14th, 2020 regarding 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.
The session was interactive as the Registrar sought to explain the reasons for the poor performance of some of the students. Clarification was sought on 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.
Even after profound query, the Ministry remains unclear about why students appeared to have performed poorer on paper one of various exams.
It is important to note that as a result of the intervention of the Minister of Education and team, 14 schools that had ungraded results have since received acceptable grades while MoE awaits the grades of other outstanding schools. The Ministry was assured that most queries would be answered within two weeks.
The MoE team was adamant that CXC should not have changed the format of the examination abruptly and that one cannot negate the fact that students may have been thrown off with the sudden change. It should be noted also 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.
Going forward, the Ministry of Education intends to closely monitor the SBA process through the development of a more rigid and elaborate protocol for the submission of same to CXC.
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. Training sessions will also be done with teachers with the intent of apprising them of the type of rating students should receive in the various profiles in order to receive the best grades in the various subject areas.
