An­na-Lisa Paul

Al­though sev­er­al re­gion­al ter­ri­to­ries are con­cerned over the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) move to ad­min­is­ter the Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am (CAPE) and Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) ex­am­i­na­tions in Ju­ly, al­though COVID-19 re­sponse may still be a ma­jor is­sue for some coun­tries, se­nior CXC of­fi­cials say it will go on as planned.

How­ev­er, CXC has as­sured that all ef­forts will be made to pre­serve the in­tegri­ty of the ex­ams in all ter­ri­to­ries.

Dur­ing a we­bi­nar yes­ter­day, CXC Reg­is­trar Dr Wayne Wes­ley said the mod­i­fied strat­e­gy was aimed at min­imis­ing dis­rup­tions to the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem whilst si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly yield­ing good grades and as­sess­ing crit­i­cal com­pe­ten­cies.

Told that Ja­maica had in­di­cat­ed it could not ad­min­is­ter ex­ams in Ju­ly due to their COVID-19 sit­u­a­tion and that Bar­ba­dos of­fi­cials were re­quest­ing a sus­pen­sion of the ex­ams, Wes­ley said, “We are un­able to speak at this mo­ment on the de­ci­sion by the Ja­maican gov­ern­ment.”

He said it was a sim­i­lar case in re­spect of Bar­ba­dos al­so.

Wes­ley said the award of fi­nal grades will in­clude marks drawn from mod­er­at­ed School-Based As­sess­ments (SBAs) and the Pa­per One which is mul­ti­ple choice. He said it was im­per­a­tive that a com­mon pa­per be ad­min­is­tered in all ter­ri­to­ries. Marks for pri­vate can­di­dates will be gleaned from Pa­pers One, Two, Three and Four.

The re­sults of both ex­ams will be avail­able by the first week in Sep­tem­ber, Wes­ley said.

He said CXC’s qual­i­ty as­sur­ance process­es will ap­ply the ap­pro­pri­ate weight­ing dur­ing grad­ing to en­sure can­di­dates are treat­ed fair­ly and in an un­bi­ased man­ner.

There are al­so con­cerns out of T&T and oth­er ter­ri­to­ries that stu­dents can­not be prop­er­ly as­sessed on SBAs and the mul­ti­ple-choice pa­per. Thes coun­tries be­lieve in the ab­sence of Pa­per Two, which re­quires long-form an­swers, will not give them a chance to prop­er­ly as­sess the stu­dents’ knowl­edge.

To this, Wes­ley said, “The de­ter­mi­na­tion of the stu­dent’s per­for­mance is not on­ly on the mul­ti­ple-choice ex­am­i­na­tion. There is al­so the SBA com­po­nent that will be re­quired.

“We would have done ex­ten­sive analy­sis in en­sur­ing that we are able to cov­er all the nec­es­sary skills and com­pe­ten­cies and where we were un­able to as­sess those, ad­di­tion­al com­po­nents would have been re­quired.”

Not­ing the emo­tion­al and men­tal health im­pact COVID-19 is hav­ing on the stu­dents’ prepa­ra­tion, Wes­ley said the with­draw­al of the Pa­per Two, “should re­duce the lev­el of anx­i­ety on the stu­dent.”

Stu­dents in the cat­e­gories of Mod­ern Lan­guages, Hu­man & So­cial Bi­ol­o­gy and Vi­su­al Arts will be re­quired to com­plete ad­di­tion­al com­po­nents, he said.

CSEC stu­dents do­ing Mod­ern Lan­guages, which in­cludes Span­ish, French and Por­tuguese, will be ex­pect­ed to write Pa­pers One, Two and Three (orals).

Those do­ing Hu­man & So­cial Bi­ol­o­gy will have to write Pa­pers One and Two.

Vi­su­al Arts stu­dents are ex­pect­ed to sub­mit SBAs along with their re­flec­tive jour­nals.

For CAPE stu­dents pur­su­ing French and Span­ish, they must write Pa­pers One, Two and Three and sub­mit their SBA. Pri­vate can­di­dates must write Pa­pers One, Two, Three and Four.

Wes­ley in­sist­ed, “Those are ex­cep­tions to the mod­i­fied ap­proach.”

He said the e-test­ing modal­i­ty will on­ly be ap­plic­a­ble to ter­ri­to­ries equipped to fa­cil­i­tate e-test­ing. In ter­ri­to­ries where the in­fra­struc­ture chal­lenges are in­sur­mount­able, it is ex­pect­ed that those can­di­dates will write pa­per-based ex­ams. He was un­able to say ex­act­ly how many ter­ri­to­ries will be ad­min­is­ter­ing pa­per-based ex­ams but said both process­es can be utilised in some ter­ri­to­ries.

Of­fi­cials said the e-test­ing modal­i­ty is not new to CXC and they have as­sured there is no room for can­di­dates to cheat. They said in or­der to ac­cess the ex­ams, stu­dents must log on to the spe­cif­ic site, fol­low­ing which the safe-ex­am brows­er locks them out of ac­cess­ing all oth­er sites.

Wes­ley said CXC was in­tent on pre­serv­ing the health and safe­ty of all stu­dents and in­vig­i­la­tors and will be en­forc­ing strict pro­to­cols re­lat­ing to phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing, wear­ing of face masks and sani­ti­sa­tion. He said pa­pers will be marked on­line.

For coun­tries choos­ing to write ex­ams in Jan­u­ary, he said the nor­mal ex­am­i­na­tion cy­cle will run.

“Come Jan­u­ary, we would have re­turned to our full ad­min­is­tra­tion,” he said.

Asked if con­sid­er­a­tion had been paid to stu­dents who do not have ac­cess to de­vices and can­not com­plete their SBAs and In­ter­nal As­sess­ments (IAs) on time, he said the dead­line for the sub­mis­sion of marks had been ex­tend­ed to June 30, while the ab­solute dead­line was Ju­ly 31.

A to­tal of 30,000 stu­dents are reg­is­tered to write the CAPE ex­ams, while 120,000 stu­dents will write the CSEC ex­ams.