Sto­ries by

An­na-Lisa Paul

The prin­ci­pal of St Mary’s Col­lege (CIC) has joined the call for a re­view by the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) of this year’s Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) and Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am (CAPE).

Nigel Joseph yes­ter­day ad­dressed par­ents of his school’s stu­dents say­ing that the school had been re­ceiv­ing re­ports main­ly from CAPE stu­dents that their grades were “vast­ly dif­fer­ent to what was ex­pect­ed.”

He said school of­fi­cials were un­able to as­sess the school’s over­all re­sults at the time to gauge the ex­tent of it as the broad­sheet was not ac­ces­si­ble. He said he gained ac­cess on Wednes­day night and “would say that the re­sults are un­prece­dent­ed in the his­to­ry of our CAPE re­sults.”

Joseph con­tin­ued: “Our ini­tial analy­sis of the CSEC re­sults al­so rais­es con­cerns in cer­tain sub­jects. It is our view that these re­sults, in no way, re­flect a true in­di­ca­tion of our stu­dent’s per­for­mance and we in­tend to is­sue cor­re­spon­dence to both CXC and the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to this ef­fect.”

He said he con­tact­ed the lo­cal CXC Reg­is­trar yes­ter­day morn­ing to in­di­cate the school’s po­si­tion but ac­knowl­edged the sit­u­a­tion was not unique to CIC, “but lit­er­al­ly all schools in the coun­try and across the Caribbean.”

Joseph sought to re­as­sure par­ents and dis­traught stu­dents that “It is my in­ten­tion to do all that is pos­si­ble to en­sure that this de­ba­cle is ad­dressed and cor­rect­ed, and with the sup­port of oth­er prin­ci­pals, the ex­tent of our dis­sat­is­fac­tion will res­onate.”

Mean­while, an of­fi­cial at an­oth­er lead­ing sec­ondary school in East Trinidad said many of his stu­dents are de­pressed as they lament­ed the poor grades they re­ceived.

He said based on his in­ter­ac­tion with stu­dents in the class­room pri­or to the COVID-19 lock-down in March, many of them had been on track to re­ceive schol­ar­ships but this was not the case fol­low­ing the re­sults.

One fa­ther told Guardian Me­dia that he has been try­ing to con­sole his daugh­ter who re­ceived three’s and four’s.

“I have been try­ing to tell her not to wor­ry, but she is sad and de­pressed now. This was a child who had all A pro­files for CAPE 1 and had got­ten ac­cept­ed to med­ical school in Ire­land.”

He said she and sev­er­al oth­er class­mates were pur­su­ing med­i­cine and were sched­uled to leave T&T next week for uni­ver­si­ty.

He said all arrange­ments, in­clud­ing air­fare and ac­com­mo­da­tion, had been booked.

He said based on the lat­est re­sults, his daugh­ter had now been re­ject­ed.

MOE: We have spo­ken to CXC

Re­spond­ing to the calls for ac­tion, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly said the Min­istry spoke to CXC on the mat­ter.

De­scrib­ing the sit­u­a­tion as re­gret­table in a re­lease yes­ter­day, Gads­by-Dol­ly said: “Es­pe­cial­ly for the stu­dents in­volved, who are al­ready stressed in this year of the pan­dem­ic.”

Re­fer­ring to the pe­ti­tion cir­cling the re­gion which in­cludes 23,000 can­di­dates in T&T and over 60,000 stu­dents in Ja­maica, the min­is­ter said while the on­line re­gion­al pe­ti­tion gath­er­ing 12,000 sig­na­tures can be un­der­stood con­tex­tu­al­ly, “no in­sti­tu­tion can rea­son­ably use that as a ba­sis for re­view of all grades.”

She added: “It does, how­ev­er, raise aware­ness of the mat­ter and in­di­cate to CXC that this is­sue must be ad­dressed to put to rest trou­bling ques­tions and con­cerns that are shared across the re­gion.”

On the is­sue of SBA scores, Gads­by-Dol­ly said they are scored by in­di­vid­ual class teach­ers and these scores are sub­mit­ted to CXC for mod­er­a­tion, which meant that what was sub­mit­ted by the school may not be the ac­tu­al score record­ed by CXC for the stu­dent and used to de­ter­mine their over­all grade.

She promised that a state­ment by CXC would be forth­com­ing, adding: “We in T&T ea­ger­ly await their elu­ci­da­tion of the com­plex is­sues sur­round­ing this mat­ter, even as we ad­vise schools and in­di­vid­u­als to fol­low the es­tab­lished pro­ce­dures to make the nec­es­sary queries.

“The MOE will take all re­quired steps to en­sure that this is­sue is ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed.”

Op­po­si­tion wants ur­gent query

Shad­ow min­is­ter for ed­u­ca­tion, Tabaquite MP Ani­ta Haynes yes­ter­day called on Gads­by-Dol­ly to launch an ur­gent query in­to the grad­ing dis­crep­an­cies.

In a state­ment, she said: “Con­cerned stu­dents, par­ents, teach­ers and school ad­min­is­tra­tors have reached out to me to high­light the fact that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of stu­dents have re­ceived grades that did not match their pro­files, that is, stu­dents with all As in their pro­file re­ceived grades V and VI.”

Haynes added: “In some in­stances, en­tire class­es re­ceived ‘un­grad­ed’ and sev­er­al oth­ers re­ceived grades not con­sis­tent with their his­tor­i­cal per­for­mances. Stu­dents with near-per­fect In­ter­nal As­sess­ments re­ceived grades IV and V.

“While it is cus­tom­ary to re­ceive re­ports of these ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties from a few stu­dents, the num­bers have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er this year, with hun­dreds of re­ports of these ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties.”

Haynes said both Min­is­ters of Ed­u­ca­tion need­ed to take this is­sue se­ri­ous­ly and act now.