The students who never turned up

Aug 21, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – A report in yesterday’s Kaieteur News that some 35,000 students across the Caribbean absconded from the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations ought to make every education policymaker sit up and take note. The figure is startling, but before we begin issuing detention for examinations absenteeism, there is a more fundamental question that must be answered: what exactly does “absconded” mean?

We do not know whether the 35,000 represents students who registered for CSEC and failed to appear for any examination at all, or students who registered for several subjects and simply failed to turn up for some of them. That distinction is critical, because the two circumstances point to very different problems, and any serious assessment of the state of Caribbean education must begin with a proper interpretation of the data.

There is, however, no escaping the fact that either interpretation raises an uncomfortable question about the confidence and commitment of our young people towards an examination that has become the principal gateway to further education and employment. If thousands of students register for examinations and then disappear when the papers are placed on the desks, something somewhere has gone seriously wrong.

The Ministry of Education in Guyana should therefore not wait for the Caribbean Examination Council to produce some regional interpretation of the numbers before examining what is happening here at home. The Ministry should determine precisely how many Guyanese students registered for CSEC, how many actually sat the examinations, how many missed individual subjects and, most importantly, why they were absent.

That inquiry is particularly necessary because CSEC is not a free exercise; it is being financed substantially by the taxpayers of Guyana. If the State is prepared to pay for students to sit as many as eight subjects, then taxpayers are entitled to know whether those opportunities are being used, and whether the present system is encouraging students to register for subjects they have little intention or capacity to complete.

The Ministry should undertake a comprehensive review of absenteeism, examining the reasons students do not appear for examinations, whether financial or family circumstances are involved, whether lack of proper classroom deterred students from turning up on examination day, and whether anxiety and workload are becoming significant factors. The results should be made public, because education policy should be driven by evidence rather than assumptions.

There is also another elephant sitting quietly in the examination hall: the obsession with producing high-flyers by counting the largest number of Grade Ones. The system has gradually created an academic arms race in which students are encouraged to pile subject upon subject onto their examination schedules, not necessarily because each subject is essential to their future, but because somebody wants their name at the top of a high-flyer list.

That is hardly a sensible definition of educational excellence. A student who earns eight Grade Ones in carefully selected subjects relevant to his or her abilities and ambitions should not automatically be considered less outstanding than another student who collects fifteen or twenty Grade Ones simply because that student was able to survive an academic marathon.

Students themselves have repeatedly complained about the extraordinary stress associated with preparing for enormous numbers of subjects. At some point, education ceases to be about learning and becomes an endurance contest, with children measuring their worth by how many examination papers they can survive.

The Ministry should therefore initiate discussions with CXC about establishing a core bundle of perhaps eight subjects for purposes of identifying the region’s and each territory’s most outstanding students. The subjects could include English, Mathematics, a science, a social science and other disciplines selected to provide a balanced measure of intellectual ability, while allowing appropriate flexibility for different academic pathways.

Such a system would not prevent any student from writing additional subjects. It would simply prevent the number of examinations written from becoming the principal measure of academic brilliance, and it would remove some of the pressure that encourages students to treat CSEC as an Olympic event in which the winner is the person carrying home the most gold medals.

Guyana cannot seriously aspire to build a modern, highly educated and productive society while ignoring why thousands of young Caribbean people are registering for examinations they subsequently fail to attend. Before we congratulate ourselves on the number of Grade Ones produced, perhaps we should first ask how many students were supposed to be sitting in those examination rooms—and why some of them never arrived.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper

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• abscent, CSEC, CXC, Peeping Tom

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