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.
