The math­e­mat­ics pa­per of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) was doable, how­ev­er, ad­mit­ted­ly it was chal­leng­ing; es­pe­cial­ly with the time frame al­lo­cat­ed to com­plete the pa­per.

This was the con­sen­sus re­ceived from a fo­cus group of young peo­ple whom Guardian Me­dia asked to com­plete the pa­per on Mon­day.

Fol­low­ing last Thurs­day’s ex­am, par­ents, teach­ers and SEA can­di­dates of the math­e­mat­ics pa­per have raised sev­er­al com­plaints about cer­tain ques­tions in the ex­am.

Many par­ents took to so­cial me­dia to vent about the pa­per claim­ing that even adults would have ex­pe­ri­enced some dif­fi­cul­ties with the ex­am.

So to put this claim to the test, Guardian Me­dia con­vened a small fo­cus group of young aca­d­e­mics at our Port-of- Spain of­fice.

In or­der to sim­u­late sim­i­lar pres­sure, giv­en their ter­tiary lev­el ed­u­ca­tion, to that which a can­di­date would, they were al­lot­ted 50 min­utes in­stead of the usu­al 75 min­utes. The clock ran out be­fore most could com­plete the pa­per.

“It was re­al­ly a race against time,” 22-year-old fi­nan­cial an­a­lyst Christo­pher Chung said, “I thought you know, 30, 40 min­utes could have done it - do every­thing in half a minute. But com­ing down to the end was pret­ty chal­leng­ing.”

Kevin Ram­sawak, a 29-year-old youth ad­vo­cate, said the hard­est part for him with the pa­per, was the time re­quired to in­ter­pret the ques­tions.

“The ques­tion was - how to put it - very vague. So I think many stu­dents might not have been able to in­ter­pret the rel­e­vant da­ta from the ques­tions in or­der to an­swer the ques­tions. I took more time try­ing to un­der­stand what they were ask­ing for than work­ing it out.”

Ex­em­pli­fy­ing this, he drew ref­er­ence to ques­tion num­ber 39; a bar graph show­ing how many raf­fle tick­ets five boys sold.

“It wasn’t math­e­mat­i­cal, it was more of a moral ques­tion based on moral­i­ty,” he said.

Luzanne Fadahun­si, a 27-year-old fi­nan­cial an­a­lyst, al­most re­sort­ed to al­ge­bra­ic equa­tions to solve one of the ques­tions.

“It’s not what they were ask­ing, it’s how I was gonna work it out. That was my thing. I knew the an­swer I want­ed, I just didn’t know how I was go­ing to get it. For the mag­nets ques­tion (ques­tion 41) I thought to do al­ge­bra too but I know that an 11-year-old would not know how to do al­ge­bra,” Fadahun­si said. In­stead, she re­lied on the process of tri­al and er­ror.

“I think it’s okay if the ex­am has one or two of those but I think it had a bit too much.”

Noah Fur­longe-Walk­er, 19, a re­cent grad­u­ate of Fa­ti­ma Col­lege, how­ev­er, ac­tu­al­ly used al­ge­bra to solve the ques­tion.

“For that ques­tion, I ac­tu­al­ly did it us­ing al­ge­bra... but I know an SEA stu­dent would not know how to do it. They would maybe have to go through tri­al and er­ror and that may be a much more dif­fi­cult process—nerve-rack­ing process,” he said.

Ram­sawak be­lieved that the ex­am need­ed to be up­dat­ed to more ad­e­quate­ly test a stu­dent’s knowl­edge.

“I think oth­er than struc­tur­ing the ques­tion in such a way for stu­dents to un­der­stand is one thing, but al­so get­ting oth­er av­enues of learn­ing about a par­tic­u­lar top­ic and ques­tions posed is an­oth­er thing. The for­mat of the ex­am is an ar­cha­ic for­mat and there are dif­fer­ent av­enues and ways of test­ing a stu­dent’s knowl­edge,” he said.