Jesse Ramdeo

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly has ex­pressed con­cern over the fail­ure by the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tion Coun­cil (CXC) to pro­vide a time­frame for the com­mence­ment and com­ple­tion of an as­sess­ment of in­to the re­sults of this year’s CSEC and CAPE re­sults.

On Mon­day, the chair­man of CXC, Sir Hi­lary Beck­les as­sured that an in­de­pen­dent re­view team will analyse the “spe­cif­ic chal­lenges” re­gion­al ed­u­ca­tors and stu­dents have raised fol­low­ing the re­lease of this year’s re­sults.

How­ev­er, in an im­me­di­ate re­sponse to the CXC chair­man’s state­ment, Min­is­ter Gads­by-Dol­ly not­ed that while CXC bowed to the mount­ing pres­sure across the re­gion, it failed to quell the anx­i­ety caused by the is­sues raised.

“We not­ed that no time­lines have been ad­vanced for the start and end of the re­view process.”

Both Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos gov­ern­ment min­is­ters have joined in the call for in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the re­sults of CAPE where some stu­dents said they had re­ceived “un­grad­ed” re­sults.

Gads­by-Dol­ly said just Tues­day a let­ter was sent to CXC call­ing for an “ap­pro­pri­ate res­o­lu­tion strat­e­gy.”

She ad­vised that the scope of the re­view al­so be widened to in­clude spe­cif­ic in­for­ma­tion about the SBA mod­er­a­tion process and its re­sults for schools through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter al­so called for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the weight­ing of the ex­am com­po­nents which were used to cal­cu­late the fi­nal com­pos­ite scores for stu­dents.

She said based on the myr­i­ad queries raised by schools and in­di­vid­u­als, in­clud­ing those which were ap­pend­ed for at­ten­tion, cou­pled with the valid ma­tric­u­la­tion is­sues be­ing raised by stu­dents and par­ents, the MOE ex­pressed its hope and ex­pec­ta­tion, that the re­port of the In­de­pen­dent Re­view Team “would be sub­mit­ted ex­pe­di­tious­ly.”

Ac­cord­ing to her, a fur­ther sub­mis­sion from the min­istry on Fri­day, Oc­to­ber 2, 2020, will trans­mit any fur­ther queries re­ceived from prin­ci­pals to CXC for in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

In her let­ter last week, the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry sent a let­ter to the man­age­ment of CXC out­lin­ing their con­cerns about in­con­sis­ten­cies with stu­dents’ CAPE and CSEC re­sults.

There had been mount­ing calls from stu­dents for CXC to re­view the ex­am­i­na­tion re­sults, fol­low­ing ques­tions over the grad­ing scheme used and grades al­lo­cate to hun­dreds of stu­dents.

She said last week, “Right now, we have ap­prox­i­mate­ly ten schools and we know we will have more who have sub­mit­ted let­ters to the lo­cal reg­is­trar out­lin­ing queries at a school lev­el and we will present that and what­ev­er else is re­ceived, be­cause we in­tend to send this sec­ond let­ter out by next week.”