By Theresa Goodwin
A small group of educators on the island have given their full support to a major online campaign that was recently launched in Barbados and other countries in the region demanding a complete and thorough review of the 2020 Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) results.
Kim Harper launched the campaign on Change.org on Tuesday. She alleges that the Barbados-based CXC has made a mistake with regards to the graded results that were distributed to candidates via the online student portals this week.
Porter claimed that many students believe the grades attributed to them do not accurately reflect their performance in the exams, and they are therefore petitioning the Caricom Secretariat to immediately reconsider and review all the results.
Up to 5pm on Thursday, over 14,000 people had signed the petition which is being widely circulated on social media.
A number of local educators are currently promoting the petition on their personal social media pages and are also speaking in support of the document.
One educator commented saying, “This should have been done when they announced the format for the exam multiple choice. Students do not generally do well with multiple choice questions. It was destined to happen.”
Observer media also reached out to a number of teachers who indicated that, while they share similar concerns, they are awaiting a response for grades in some subject areas and would rather withhold public comment until such results are received.
Meanwhile, Guyana’s Ministry of Education has also vehemently registered its dissatisfaction with the Council as it relates to the apparent poor grading of students.
The Ministry, in a statement on Thursday, said it is concerned that there seems to be discrepancies with the grades for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).
“Students in Guyana and across the region are currently traumatised 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,” the statement from the Education Ministry said.
The discrepancy, the Ministry explained, occurred in particular subject areas to students across the country.
The Ministry said too that the same students in year one CAPE who did excellently, scored poorly in year two.
It was also found that schools that submitted all of the SBAs within the timeframe and received confirmation emails from CXC, received an ungraded result in some subject areas while there were unacceptable grades for integrated mathematics, pure math papers one and two, and Caribbean Studies at many schools.