?The PM's state­ment that "T&T is do­ing far bet­ter than all the oth­er ter­ri­to­ries in the Caribbean at this time" (Guardian, Ju­ly 11) is like say­ing that the PNM has more "moral and spir­i­tu­al val­ues" than any oth­er par­ty at this time.�It is a se­duc­tive truth.�

Once again we seem caught in the Man­ning-Hart-Richards ad­min­is­tra­tion's fan­ta­sy, a seem­ing­ly end­less rep­e­ti­tion of au­thor­i­ta­tive dream-state­ments and in­fan­tile wish-ful­fil­ments with­out ref­er­ence to ac­tu­al ev­i­dence or room for refu­ta­tion. �

While I do not have at my dis­pos­al ac­cess to the wealth of in­for­ma­tion and re­sources that the Prime Min­is­ter's Of­fice does (un­like the Pres­i­dent's pre­sum­ably) I base my refu­ta­tion of the PM's state­ment on a sin­gle counter-ex­am­ple–the case of CSEC math­e­mat­ics 2008.�I choose math­e­mat­ics as it is the area with which I am most fa­mil­iar, the one per­haps most rel­e­vant to our lead­ers' de­sire to make T&T in­to a pre­ferred des­ti­na­tion for fi­nan­cial ser­vices and which (pre­sum­ably) jus­ti­fies our cur­rent de­vel­op­men­tal de­ci­sions and agen­da.

The re­port on the per­for­mance of stu­dents of T&T on the 2008 CSEC math­e­mat­ics ex­am­i­na­tion (avail­able through the CXC Web site) is dis­ag­gre­gat­ed from the rest of the re­gion's be­cause of the com­pro­mised ex­am­i­na­tion of last year.�The re­sults how­ev­er are not atyp­i­cal. It states on its first page that of the 20,000 or so T&T stu­dents writ­ing the Gen­er­al Pro­fi­cien­cy ex­am in math­e­mat­ics last year, 47 per cent of the can­di­dates "passed," ie achieved Grades I-III and 40 per cent of the can­di­dates scored at least half the avail­able marks.�

This in­deed is "far bet­ter" than the rest of the re­gion where the over­all pass rate is an abysmal 37 per cent with on­ly 28 per cent scor­ing more than half of the marks. Far bet­ter is yet far from sat­is­fac­to­ry.�We ought not to con­grat­u­late our­selves so hearti­ly on our mea­sur­able medi­oc­rity.�On the Pa­per 2, which re­quires stu­dents to demon­strate so­lu­tions not mere­ly shade an­swers, on­ly 33 per cent of can­di­dates in T&T scored at least half of the marks.

The true scale of our un­der­per­for­mance is de­tailed in the litany of er­rors, mis­takes and lack of math­e­mat­i­cal un­der­stand­ing re­port­ed. On the very first ques­tion which as­sess­es fun­da­men­tal math­e­mat­i­cal skills such as stu­dents' abil­i­ty to per­form ba­sic op­er­a­tions on mixed num­bers, solve prob­lems as­so­ci­at­ed with in­come tax, cal­cu­late a per­cent­age of a de­rived quan­ti­ty and write as a per­cent­age the ra­tio of two quan­ti­ties, on­ly 15 per cent of stu­dents were able to get a full score – the most for any ques­tion on the pa­per, yet the over­all mean score of which was less than half of the to­tal.

In fact on­ly for three out of the 14 ques­tions on the pa­per is the mean score more than half of the to­tal avail­able for the prob­lem. I am a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed, the PM's spin is usu­al­ly "far bet­ter." �In clos­ing, I of­fer Dr In­dra Haraks­ingh, Christo­pher Br­ere­ton, and our five young men and young woman rep­re­sent­ing T&T at the 50th In­ter­na­tion­al Math­e­mat­ics Olympiad in Ger­many this year my sin­cer­est wish­es for a suc­cess­ful com­pe­ti­tion.

Steven Khan

Cana­da