The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) is sticking to its guns that anyone with concerns about the results from this year’s examinations should go through the normal channels for queries and reviews.
For more than an hour, registrar and chief executive officer Dr Wayne Wesley fielded questions from media across the Caribbean via Zoom on Friday. And he said contrary to prevailing notion, there was no wide scale concern about results because the grades were higher than last year.
During a presentation prior to engaging the media, Wesley said there was an increase in “acceptable grades” for both the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) and Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations at 93 and 79 per cent, respectively.
However, he gave the assurance CXC would work with the various ministries of education “to address those concerns in a fulsome way, providing clarity . . . and a detailed report on the concerns being raised”.
For CAPE, 93.25 per cent of candidates received acceptable grades, compared to 92.98 per cent in last year, 92.39 per cent in 2018 and 91.79 per cent in 2017. Similarly for CSEC, this year’s figure was 79.57 per cent in contrast to 78.31 in 2019, 77 per cent in 2018 and 75.35 per cent in 2017.
Wesley said CXC adopted a modified approach to grading “that would allow for the administration and the presentation of results this year despite the disruptions that would have been caused to the education system” by COVID-19.
That modified approach combined multiple choice and School Based Assessments (SBAs) or alternative to SBAs. In the past, CXC did about 30 per cent moderation, but it jumped to 100 per cent in 2020 for all subjects. That means the teachers’ scores were not final. The final scores were only determined after moderation.
The registrar fielded questions from journalists, about profiles, grades, reviews and queries, waiving costs for reviews and the designations of absent or unmarked.
Wesley sought to dispel any concerns about transparency within the organisation regarding SBAs, pointing to “accountability measures” in the schools and validation by principals and CXC. (SAT)
