Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

“Les ex­a­m­ens com­men­cent au­jourd’hui.”

“Los exámenes comien­zan hoy.”

When trans­lat­ed in­to Eng­lish the first two lines in this ar­ti­cle writ­ten in French and Span­ish re­spec­tive­ly means “the ex­ams start to­day.”

And that’s ex­act­ly what is sched­uled to take place this morn­ing when the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tion Coun­cil’s Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tion (CAPE) and the Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) ex­am­i­na­tions are card­ed to be­gin to­day.

To­day CAPE will be hav­ing its French and Span­ish Units 1 and 2 Pa­per Four, while CSEC will be hav­ing French 3 (Gen­er­al), Span­ish 3 (Gen­er­al), Por­tuguese 3 (Gen­er­al) and Mu­sic 2 (Gen­er­al).

CXC’s ex­ams were orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled to start in May but the timetable had to be re­vised be­cause of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Reg­is­trar of the CXC Dr Wayne Wes­ley made a pre­sen­ta­tion at t to Cari­com ex­plain­ing that the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the mod­i­fied ex­am­i­na­tion process for the award of valid grades and pre­serv­ing the in­tegri­ty of the ex­am­i­na­tions in­volved the ad­min­is­tra­tion of Pa­per 1 (Mul­ti­ple Choice As­sess­ment), School Based As­sess­ment, and where ap­plic­a­ble, ad­di­tion­al as­sess­ment com­po­nents along with ap­pro­pri­ate mod­el­ling ac­count­ing for his­tor­i­cal da­ta and teacher-pre­dict­ed in­for­ma­tion.

Wes­ley said ex­am re­sults are now sched­uled to be re­leased in the first week of Sep­tem­ber.

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia yes­ter­day said that he is sat­is­fied that things are in place for the ex­ams to be be­gin to­day.

“We are sat­is­fied that every thing is in place be­cause we have worked hard to en­sure that all of our school are in readi­ness,” Gar­cia said.

“We vis­it­ed the schools to make sure that the schools are phys­i­cal­ly in or­der be­cause we know that we have the so­cial dis­tanc­ing of six feet apart so the class­es must be so con­fig­ured to en­sure that you main­tain that six feet apart which has been pre­scribed by the min­istry of health,” he said.

“In our vis­its to schools we were able to get a first-hand view of what was be­ing done to en­sure this is main­tained. We ob­served that every­thing is okay,” Gar­cia said.

Gar­cia wished all stu­dents the best go­ing for­ward with their ex­am­i­na­tions.

“We wish all the stu­dents well in spite of the con­straints that we ex­pe­ri­enced with the COVID 19, we know that a great ma­jor­i­ty of them have been study­ing, they have been us­ing every op­por­tu­ni­ty to avail them­selves,” Gar­cia said

Gar­cia said 150,000 stu­dents have been ac­cess­ing the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion’s School Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem, while over 6,000 teach­ers have been us­ing the on­line plat­form to up­load in­for­ma­tion.

Gar­cia said his main con­cern with the up­com­ing ex­ams is that sev­er­al stu­dents have not com­plet­ed their School Based As­sess­ments for CXC.

He urged them to get it done.

“We still have some con­cerns that there are some stu­dents have not yet com­plet­ed their SBAs but in emer­gency cir­cum­stances they will have un­til the end of Ju­ly to fin­ish their SBAs .We are urg­ing our par­ents, our stu­dents and the teach­ers to give our stu­dents the en­cour­age­ment to com­plete their SBAs,” he said.

Gar­cia said with­out the SBA mark the stu­dents would not be able to pass their ex­ams.