Controversy will mar the release of the NGSA results

Jul 03, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Tension is in the air. More than fourteen thousand Guyanese students and their parents are nervously awaiting the results of the National Grade Six Assessment. The Ministry of Education has announced that the results are going to be made known this Tuesday.
There is a great deal of competition for the top secondary schools in Guyana. There will be scenes of exultation from those who have passed for these top schools and cries of anguish from those who failed to get to these schools.
The results amount to a virtual lottery, even though the allocation is based on performance. A small number of students will gain entry to the top schools, the ultimate prize, while the vast majority will have to settle for second and third grade schools. This is what makes the examinations a lottery. There are only so many top places to be filled by thousands of school children.
This in itself forms the basis for parents to cry foul. They are disappointed with their children’s marks. They seek justification for their disappointment in conspiracy theories. The disappointed parents seek all manner of explanations for the results, including accepting rumors that certain schools and students had access to the question papers before the examinations.
Suspicion is in the making for this year’s results for another reason. Those results are going to be greeted, unfortunately, with suspicion, because of a measure introduced, controversially this year.
This year the Ministry of Education did something that was bound to raise suspicion whenever the results are released. The Ministry asked students to write their names on the answer scripts, in addition, of course, to their student number. The reason why this was done has never been satisfactorily explained. There seems to be no good reason why apart from writing their student numbers, students were asked to write their names on the forms.
The criticism was immediately made – and the Ministry of Education had to be aware of this – that this measure would open the marking of the scripts to subjectivity. It means that the person marking the paper would know whose paper they were marking. This would allow for the injection of subjectivity in the marking process.
The recording of the students’ names on the answer sheets opens up a whole range of possibilities for subjective marking based on the school, name, race and even personal knowledge, by the marker of the student. The reason why student numbers have been introduced into examinations for over fifty years is precisely to prevent such subjectivity.
The examiner must never know the name or identity of the students whose scripts he or she is marking. The entire integrity of the marking process is compromised if this is known. The Ministry of Education violated this rule when it decided that students should write their names on the answer sheet for this year’s examination.
Just why this was done was never satisfactorily explained to the public. To say that it was simply a security feature is not a good enough justification. The purpose of the student identification number was aimed to avoiding students having to record their names on the scripts.
This decision is going to cast suspicion over the examination results. Parents will complain that there was favouritism, manipulation and cheating in the process. These unfounded criticisms were made in the past and they will simply multiply this year when the results are released.
The Ministry of Education needs to ensure that come next year, this outdated system of students recording their names on the answer sheet does not reoccur. They need to go back to the tried and tested system of students recording only their student numbers.
If the problem is that many students write the wrong number and therefore this presents problems for collating the results, there are built-in mechanisms to deal with this problem. One of these is the student centre number which will allow for the number of the script to be traced to a specific school.
But the most effective means of avoiding problems with wrongly written student numbers is to have a strong system of invigilation. Invigilators are required to check the student’s ID slip against what is written on the answer sheet. This is usually done two times. It is first done during the exams itself.
The invigilators go around verifying the identity of the students writing the examinations. All that is required is for a check to be made at the same time to see that the student number is correctly written. Second, when the scripts are collected, a second round of checks can be done.
Guyana uses an outdated system for examinations. In most countries each student’s script is barcoded with all the student’s information. The information can also be read by scanning the document. So even if the student incorrectly records his or her student number, this does not cause hiccups because the barcode is specific to that paper and child. Guyana needs to be going in this direction rather than backward.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Education must indicate the total number of cases in which students have written incorrect student identification numbers. This is not usually a problem in examinations around the world, and it is strange that it should be a problem in Guyana which has such a favourable literacy rate.
If there are a large number of such mistakes, it means that the Ministry, instead of introducing subjectivity into the marking system, should perhaps address the reason for the high incidence of incorrectly written student numbers.

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