Carisa Lee

Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) CEO and Reg­is­trar Dr Wayne Wes­ley says for­mal com­plaints about grades for this year’s CSEC and CAPE ex­am­i­na­tions have not yet been re­port­ed to them di­rect­ly.

“We have not re­ceived any for­mal com­plaint from any­one,” Wes­ley said dur­ing a press con­fer­ence from Bar­ba­dos.

How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted that sev­er­al re­gion­al Min­is­ters of Ed­u­ca­tion had reached out with con­cern about the is­sue to CXC, which he is look­ing in­to.

On Thurs­day, Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly an­nounced that she had spo­ken with CXC of­fi­cial­ly per­son­al­ly fol­low­ing com­plaints she had re­ceived about anom­alies in the grades and mark­ing of SBAs.

Ac­cord­ing to re­gion­al re­ports, Guyana’s Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Priya Man­ickc­hand al­so con­tact­ed CXC and de­scribed the grad­ing as “poor”.

Queen’s Col­lege, a sec­ondary school in Guyana, has since threat­ened to leave CXC and take le­gal ac­tion over al­leged botched re­sults.

Oth­er re­gion­al coun­tries to have raised is­sues with the re­sults in­clude Bar­ba­dos, St Lu­cia, Ja­maica and Grena­da.

How­ev­er, Wes­ley yes­ter­day at­trib­uted the lack of of­fi­cial com­plaints to the bet­ter over­all re­sults that were record­ed this year.

“I think the no­tion is not true, as a mat­ter of fact you have less peo­ple re­ceiv­ing less than ac­cept­able grades,” Wes­ley said.

Ac­cord­ing to graphs shown dur­ing the press con­fer­ence, the CSEC re­gion­al per­cent­age of ac­cept­able grades was 79.5 per cent, high­er than 2019’s 78.3 per cent, 2018’s 77per cent and 2017’s 75 per cent.

The sta­tis­tics al­so showed CAPE re­sults were the high­est for the last three years at 93.2 per cent, com­pared to 92.9 per cent last year, 92.3 per cent in 2018 and 91.7 per cent in 2017.

But even with this da­ta, re­porters at­tempt­ed to read com­plaints from stu­dents who claimed they were cheat­ed and their grades were not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what their pro­files sug­gest­ed dur­ing the press con­fer­ence.

How­ev­er, Wes­ley said in­ter­nal checks done by CXC have not shown ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties and said he could not re­spond to some­thing that was not ver­i­fied.

“All our da­ta we have re­viewed, all the things that we have looked at, and en­sure that all our process­es and sys­tems are in place has not re­vealed what is be­ing said,” he said.

The ex­ams were orig­i­nal­ly card­ed for May/June but be­cause of COVID-19 took place in Ju­ly, with a num­ber of changes to the for­mat. The changes in­clud­ed ad­min­is­tra­tion of at least one mul­ti­ple-choice as­sess­ment of com­mon pa­per, school-based as­sess­ments and al­ter­na­tives to SBAs for pri­vate can­di­dates.

Asked if these changes were to blame for the in­con­sis­ten­cies in the grad­ing, Wes­ley said the weight­ing of the marks re­mained the same even with the mod­i­fi­ca­tion.

He said he couldn’t ex­plain the mark­ing mech­a­nism at the time but said the sys­tems were ro­bust and main­tained. “I can nev­er agree to anom­alies,” he said.

The dead­line for re­views and queries of grades is Oc­to­ber 23 but CXC charges US$30 for re­views while queries are free.

And even with the ris­ing num­ber of com­plaints, Wes­ley said at this time there were no plans to waive that bill.

Af­ter CXC re­leased CAPE and CSEC re­sults on Tues­day, thou­sands of stu­dents and teach­ers from T&T and across the re­gion ex­pressed con­cern and ques­tioned the coun­cil’s grad­ing sys­tem.

“CXC must let every­one know how these pa­pers were grad­ed,” one stu­dent wrote on so­cial me­dia.

“Please look in­to this mat­ter as­ap, cause I’m not pleased with my stu­dents’ grades it’s re­al­ly un­fair to them,” one teacher post­ed to Face­book.