Carisa Lee

For pri­ma­ry school pupils, the two years lead­ing up to the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­ams are usu­al­ly de­scribed as crit­i­cal to their prepa­ra­tion.

But those who wrote this year’s ex­am spent most of that time away from the phys­i­cal class­room, as the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic con­fined them to on­line class­es.

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly be­lieves this at­trib­uted to their low per­for­mance this year.

“This en­dors­es the need for the Gov­ern­ment to have re­turned stu­dents to the phys­i­cal class­room de­spite the chal­lenges, to give them the best chance at ed­u­ca­tion­al suc­cess,” Gads­by-Dol­ly said as she spoke about the over­all re­sults.

Out of the 19,079 pupils (51 per cent male and 49 per cent fe­male) who wrote this year’s ex­am­i­na­tion, the av­er­age score for Math­e­mat­ics was 41.9 per cent, in Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts 44.3 per cent and in Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts Writ­ing 44.39 per cent.

This rep­re­sent­ed a re­duc­tion from 2021, she said, where the scores were Math­e­mat­ics 46.9 per cent, Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts 56.2 per cent and Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts Writ­ing 56.6 per cent.

“What these sta­tis­tics show is a clear re­duc­tion of achieve­ment that cer­tain­ly can be linked to the learn­ing loss which has been pre­dict­ed glob­al­ly and lo­cal­ly due to the lack of face-to-face learn­ing,” she said.

There was al­so a re­duc­tion in the pupils who scored above 50 per cent this year when com­pared to pre­vi­ous years — 2022: 37.06 per cent, 2021: 52.49 per cent and 2020: 63 per cent.

Those who scored un­der 50 per cent in­creased this year to 52.6 per cent, where­as 2021 was 44.9 per cent and 2020 came in at 34.8 per cent.

Some 27.81 per cent scored be­low 30 per cent when com­pared to 2021’s 17.7 per cent and 11 per cent in 2020.

Al­so, 21.6 per cent of pupils passed for their first choice this year and 10.3 per cent of them have to re-sit the ex­am next year due to their poor per­for­mances.

A to­tal of 0.47 per cent scored over 90 per cent. That per­cent­age was three last year.

“Over 9,000 stu­dents have scored less than 50 per cent in the 2022 SEA,” the min­is­ter said.

To help these pupils pre­pare for sec­ondary school, the min­istry will run a va­ca­tion Re­vi­sion Pro­gramme from Ju­ly 18-Au­gust 12 at 26 sec­ondary schools in a face-to-face for­mat. Class­es will be con­duct­ed from 9 am to 3 pm and reg­is­tra­tion runs from Ju­ly 11-15 at sec­ondary schools in the com­mu­ni­ties.

Gads­by-Dol­ly said the four-week pro­gramme will cost the Gov­ern­ment $10 mil­lion and of­fi­cers of the Cur­ricu­lum Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Di­vi­sion from the min­istry will train the 600 teach­ers need­ed for the pro­gramme.

This year was al­so the first year the SEA Re­sults Por­tal was in­tro­duced and pupils were able to ac­cess their re­sults from 12.01 am yes­ter­day. Many pupils and their par­ents, in fact, opt­ed not to go to their schools ear­ly yes­ter­day, as has been cus­tom­ary in the past, to col­lect re­sults as a re­sult of hav­ing ac­cessed them ear­li­er on­line.

The min­is­ter said at the time of the press con­fer­ence, the por­tal had 315,000 hits and no tech­ni­cal is­sues were re­port­ed. This, she said, will re­place the phys­i­cal col­lec­tion of the re­sults.

The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion will al­so no longer an­nounce the pre­lim­i­nary re­sults for the top pupil/s for the SEA ex­ams.

Ac­cord­ing to Gads­by-Dol­ly, this prac­tice that was meant to in­spire and en­cour­age the top pupils and oth­ers has caused un­healthy com­pet­i­tive­ness that over­shad­ows these mer­i­to­ri­ous per­for­mances.

“The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion is ex­treme­ly con­cerned that this pub­lic prac­tice now has the po­ten­tial to cause our young schol­ars to be placed un­der un­due pres­sure to se­cure a high rank­ing in the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion,” she said.

Gads­by-Dol­ly said the pub­lic top pupil an­nounce­ment has been dis­fig­ured by chang­ing so­ci­etal at­ti­tudes in­to a prac­tice that now pro­duces great anx­i­ety, neg­a­tiv­i­ty and men­tal dis­tress for chil­dren.

She said from now on, the rank­ing list of SEA scores will on­ly be fi­nalised af­ter the re­view pe­ri­od has elapsed and can be pri­vate­ly re­quest­ed up­on writ­ten re­quest to the min­istry. The re­view pe­ri­od will end in mid-Au­gust and queries can be sub­mit­ted by Ju­ly 9.