The Ministry of Education – Guyana is registering vehemently with the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), its dissatisfaction with the apparent poor grading of students at the 2020 CSEC and CAPE examinations.
In a statement today, the Ministry of Education said it is concerned that there seems to be discrepancies with the grades that were awarded in particular subject areas to students across the country. Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand has since spoken to the Registrar of CXC and has expressed her concerns. That conversation will be followed up by a letter addressing the many complaints and a demand to have them addressed.
The complaints by students, parents and teachers, backed by statistics range from:
– Discrepancies in teachers’ projected grades and CXC final awards being significant in the results of many students.
– Maximum SBA scores having been attained by students who believe strongly that they answered the multiple-choice questions (many of which were questions repeated from previous years) correctly and yet they received poor grades.
– students of schools that have been historically performing optimally in these examinations have been awarded poor grades at this year’s CSEC and CAPE results which represent a stark deviation from the norm. Nothing else in those schools have changed including the teachers.
– the same students in year one CAPE who did excellently, scored poorly in year two.
– Schools which submitted all of the SBAs within the timeframe and received confirmation emails from CXC and received an ungraded result in some subject areas.
– There were unacceptable grades for Integrated Mathematics, Pure Maths papers one and two and Caribbean Studies at many schools
“Students in Guyana and across the region are currently traumatized and disenchanted, something we cannot accept. This Ministry of Education will leave no stone unturned and will pursue solutions with CXC until there is an acceptable resolution to the matter. We are still receiving more complaints and gathering information. The Minister of Education is going to aggressively pursue this matter with CXC in the best interest of the nation’s children”, the statement said.
The following statement was issued today by the Bishops’ High School Old Students’ Association
The Bishops’ High School Old Students’ Association (BHSOSA) wishes to express its concern with the glaring inconsistencies in the awarded grades and profiles issued to our students and others across Guyana who sat the July/August 2020 Caribbean Examinations Council’s CSEC and CAPE examinations. It is our firm belief that these grades do not accurately reflect the true and fair performance of our students and therefore, we join the clarion call demanding that CXC,
1. Issues a statement clearly addressing its evaluation methodology for the award of grades and,
2. Commit to an immediate and thorough review of the results issued on 22nd September, 2020, with no cost attached.
We wish to remind the Caribbean Examinations Council that as a collective Caribbean Region, our students’ concerns were expressed prior to the hosting of these examinations. They held firm in their need for the credibility of these examinations not to be compromised in any way. Students’ perturbation for the weighting of the examinations and School Based Assessments were also expressed with no clear understanding of CXC’s intention to handle same. It was demanded of CXC that the integrity of these examinations be maintained. Today, these concerns have now earned merit.
We also implore the Ministry of Education, Guyana to actively pursue an investigative process into these results immediately. Our students deserve to be proud of their efforts and their investment.
The Bishops’ High School Old Students’ Association lends its unequivocal support to our student body and to our fellow colleagues who are also duly affected.
Kadeem J. Davis,
President,
BHSOSA
