This year’s Caribbean Education Secondary Certficate (CSEC) results presented the nation with the expected crop of high-flyers, led by Ms Fatima Karim, with 20 astonishing passes, 19 of them Grade Ones. It is not the outstanding performers, however, who provide the insights into the health of the secondary education system as a whole, but the general pass rate.
Where that is concerned, the two foundation subjects which are inevitably the main focus of interest are English A and Mathematics. The first of these produced a pass rate which moved above the 50% mark for the first time in many years, with 59.3% achieving Grade III or above. It is still not the rate one would hope to see, but there is no doubt it is an advance.
In the case of Mathematics, however, the news was altogether less welcome: only 38.37% of Guyanese students who sat the exam achieved a pass. As we reported on Thursday, Permanent Secretary Delma Nedd said that this was almost 7% less than the 45.07% pass rate in the subject last year, and is lower than the 38.75% pass rate in 2014. Ms Nedd had no explanation to volunteer for this seemingly dramatic decline, and retreated into adverting attention to the Commission of Inquiry into the State of the Education System which is due to submit its findings in December. “…We hope that coming out of that inquiry is a recommendation going forward. Next year, at a policy level we will introduce new initiatives and measures to change the picture that we are seeing currently,” we quoted her as saying.
Ms Nedd also told the media that 12,809 candidates had sat the examinations in 35 subjects, and there had been “excellent” performances in 15, where over 75% of examinees achieved passes of Grades One to Three. The subjects she mentioned in this category, however, (with the exception of Biology and French) would not be recognizable to the older generation which took these exams, including, as they do, Principles of Business, Electronic Document Preparation, Building Technology and the like. Furthermore, one does not know the number of entrants for each subject. If, for the sake of argument, there were only ten candidates in French, say, and they achieved a 75% pass rate, it would not have great significance for the CSEC cohort as a whole.
The subjects in which it was reported there were “satisfactory” performances included the more traditional areas such as Geography, Caribbean History, Physics and Spanish. Grades One to Three exceeded 50% in these instances, and once this was extended to encompass Grade IV, then the percentage rose to 75%. It has to be said, however, that most employers do not view a Grade IV as a pass – or, at least, an acceptable pass. Be that as it may, the overall pass rate increased very slightly, from 62.72% last year, to 63.39% this year. This is not, however, a very meaningful difference.
As is often observed, education is a cumulative process, and it is difficult to obtain a sudden dramatic upgrade in the space of a year, unless there has been some high-level intervention with specialist teaching in a project school or schools. Something of that nature in Mathematics was undertaken during former Minister Priya Manickchand’s watch, and did produce some temporary positive results.
However, to achieve across-the-board improvements would require a much larger investment at lower levels in the education system on which the CSEC would then be mounted. It would be no surprise to anyone if the CoI were to report in a few months’ time that good teaching is in short supply in our schools; that has been known for years. Where Maths and Science are concerned, the shortage of qualified teachers is probably acute, and without classroom instruction, guidance and stimulation from educators who know what they are doing, results are inevitably going to decline.
It must be said too that many children – and perhaps their parents too – have no particular motivation to work at Maths (and by extension, the sciences) because they see no future in it; it is just something that they have to do. The fact that the lead performer this year would like to go into the field of petroleum engineering could be significant; the advent of ExxonMobil here theoretically could open possibilities for those qualified in the applied sciences – and Mathematics too – making them more desirable subjects in the eyes of students.
As it is, it would be interesting to see a breakdown of how many candidates sat which subjects – English A and Maths apart, since most students will be obliged to take these. How many students tackled Physics, for example, as opposed to Electronic Document Preparation? How many elected to do Spanish or English B (Literature)?
Aside from all the other myriad problems in the school system which will no doubt be brought to light in December, it is worth repeating, as said above, that the teaching crisis is a critical factor. Unless that is addressed, the Maths results will continue to disappoint, and other subjects too will miss their targets.
