JANELLE BERNARD

Pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Coun­cil of Par­ents and Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tions (NCP­TA), Clarence Men­doza, says no ma­jor changes have been made to the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment, gen­er­al­ly known as the SEA ex­am.

Men­doza who spoke to­day on CNC3's “The Morn­ing Brew”, says all the el­e­ments of the ex­am are still present in the key sub­ject ar­eas, name­ly Math­e­mat­ics, Eng­lish Com­pre­hen­sion and Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts.

“The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion re­al­ly hasn't made any ma­jor changes to­ward the SEA,” he ex­plains.  “We must un­der­stand that go­ing for­ward, our stu­dents—with the lit­tle as­sis­tance that they will be get­ting by the Min­istry re­mov­ing a cer­tain per­cent­age in the sub­ject ar­eas, but they did not re­move the skillsets.”

He added: “Our par­ents can as­sist our stu­dents. Our teach­ers will be work­ing hard with out stu­dents in mak­ing sure the skillsets con­tin­ue to stay there in the sub­ject mat­ters.”

Mr Men­doza says that the Na­tion­al Con­sul­ta­tion on Ed­u­ca­tion should have placed more fo­cus on re­mod­el­ling the ex­am, as well as the cur­rent par­tic­i­pa­tion rate for on­line learn­ing.

“With our stu­dents do­ing on­line learn­ing, what's per­cent­age of them are re­al­ly do­ing on­line learn­ing?  What is the dropout rate for stu­dents at this point in time dur­ing this pan­dem­ic?” he asked.  “This is the ma­jor con­sul­ta­tion that should be tak­ing place.”

Ear­li­er this week, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion an­nounced that the 2021 edi­tion of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) will take place on June 10th, with a re­duc­tion in the num­ber of ques­tions be­ing posed to stu­dents.