The Ministry of Education is due to make a decision on sanctioning teachers over the failure to submit students’ School Based Assessments (SBAs) scores to the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) for this year’s regional exams after the regional body has completed requested reviews.
Minister of Education Priya Manickchand on Saturday told reporters that CXC has said that it will be done with reviewing Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) results for the ministry in about two weeks.
Manickchand explained that the Council has indicated that while it was somewhat lenient with reviewing grades for those students who had partial grades sent in, those without will not be reviewed. She further explained that these students were affected by negligence and that cannot be allowed to happen and the ministry is taking the omission very seriously.
Manickchand said that she has been in personal constant contact with the Council to ensure, as far as possible, that the students are not at a disadvantage when they didn’t do anything wrong. Added to that, she said CXC has related that some of the information sent to it by Guyana was incomplete, as a result of missing cover pages and scores, resulting in them being automatically listed as ungraded.
To resolve this, she said that once it could be determined that the scores and completed SBAs were submitted before the deadline, CXC is willing to review. This is the reason some 11 of 20 schools that requested to have ungraded marks rechecked were awarded marks.
As for when a public announcement will be made of the CSEC and CAPE results, Manickchand said, “We usually give an announcement that goes along the line of showing who has the most [Grade Ones] at this point. We didn’t this year for obvious reasons.” She added that the ministry doesn’t actually know who the top student is. She explained that while every year students review their grades, this year the top student might change given the circumstances and especially since students are “up in arms” about their grades, which could change. For this reason, the ministry plans to wait until CXC determines the grades and makes its official announcement regarding grades on a regional scale.
On September 22nd, CXC released results for those who sat examinations for CAPE and CSEC but many students were dissatisfied with the grades awarded. The Ministry of Education intervened on behalf of the students as their grades dropped the nationwide average. After investigations by both the Ministry and CXC, it was revealed that SBA scores were not submitted by some teachers and the minister said that the ministry did not notice the oversight.