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Education Crisis

Aug 21, 2013 Editorial

The annual euphoria over the “high flyers” at CSEC and CAPE has hopefully receded by now. But before it disappears altogether, we should ponder what it means for a child of sixteen to successfully write twenty subjects at CSEC. While older heads might grumble that the CSEC syllabus and marking schemes have diluted the GCE “O” Levels of the past, they should be reminded that School Based Assessments (SBAs) have been added, which supposedly increased the level of difficulty of being successful at the exams.
These SBAs are actually assignments in the given subjects that are administered by the local teachers and graded to marking schemes suggested by CXC. In the natural science subjects, for instance, there are an average of eighteen SBAs each, while in the Social Sciences, there is usually one extended research paper on a particular topic. By April of the year in which a child is writing CSEC, he or she would have had to submit over a hundred SBAs if more than fifteen subjects are being attempted.
SBAs can constitute up to 40% of the marking scheme in a given subject which means that the “tested” portion of the exam becomes much less significant. If for instance, students are given 90% on an SBA (which is routinely awarded to identified students)  a 50% performance on the written test can still earn them a grade 2 depending on the curve along which the students will be graded.
At the last CXC official announcement of exam results for 2012, which was held in Guyana, a CXC official observed that “plagiarism” was a problem is some countries, including Guyana. Worse than that, would be if schools were found to be assisting students with their SBAs to boost their overall performance. It may be for this reason that we may have many students finishing secondary school in a blaze of glory with ten or more CSEC subjects passed, yet cannot even perform simple tasks such as drafting a letter if employed or starting University.
The efficacy of the performance of our educational system is therefore much more relevant if we consider the results of Mathematics and English which do not demand SBAs.  This year, passes at English A, which means Grades 1- 3, were 45.69% which represented an improvement compared to last year’s 37.02 percent. In Mathematics, Grade 1- 3 passes amounted to only 28.92%, a slight decrease from last year’s 29.69 percent. A Grade 3 pass is possibly equivalent to a raw score of maybe 40% so it is sobering to consider what these scores actually mean: over 70% of our students cannot score 40% on a mathematics examination for which they spent five years being prepared.
In addition, during the last two years, the Ministry of Education had made a focused intervention to boost the scores in these two key subjects. It is clear that something drastic must be done. Over in Jamaica, which has had comparable problems with their CSEC results, their Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites noted that research, “has shown that mathematics attainment is the single most reliable education factor which is directly linked to economic growth and development.”
What all of this means is that, as we have been pointing out for the last decade, we have to look beyond the “high flyers” and take note of what the exam results mean for the development of our country – not to mention the lives of the majority of individuals that make up “our country”.
As Rev Thwaites pointed out, numeracy is the sine qua non if we are ever to pull ourselves out of the underdevelopment trap. Research has also shown that the problem can only be remedied if we confront the problem holistically: we have to look at the student, his/her home environment and most critically, the competence of those hired to impart the knowledge base – the teachers.
The answer is certainly not for us to “dumb down” the exams or to game the system so that the results “look good”.

 

 

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