Ques­tion 35, the is­sue which over­shad­owed last week's Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am un­der­scores an un­for­tu­nate break­down in com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween cru­cial stake­hold­ers for that place­ment ex­am­i­na­tion.This isn't on­ly about the ap­par­ent mis-com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and the body that set the ex­am, the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tion Coun­cil, but how more than 18,000 young can­di­dates were not prop­er­ly pre­pared men­tal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly for the ex­er­cise.

While there has been much ado about the fact that Ques­tion 35 was in­clud­ed in the ex­am al­though it was not part of the syl­labus, what has been over­looked by many of those who com­plained is that it was a sin­gle ques­tion which car­ried just three marks. It should not have caused the high lev­el of wor­ry and dis­tress that it ap­par­ent­ly did. Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, some chil­dren were so up­set that it neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed the way they wrote the rest of the ex­am. Ei­ther they did not un­der­stand that a sin­gle ques­tion would not take away suf­fi­cient marks to rad­i­cal­ly af­fect how well, or bad­ly, they did over­all or they sim­ply did not know how to deal with a mi­nor un­ex­pect­ed set­back.

This once again rais­es the ques­tion of whether the SEA is the best method of as­sess­ment, grad­ing or el­i­gi­bil­i­ty for en­try in­to sec­ondary school.The cur­rent place­ment ex­am is sup­posed to test stu­dents' com­pe­tence in Eng­lish, math­e­mat­ics and writ­ten com­po­si­tion and to de­ter­mine their readi­ness for sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion.In the­o­ry, the SEA, par­tic­u­lar­ly with its lat­est com­po­nent, the con­tin­u­ous as­sess­ment el­e­ment, should re­sult in a less stress­ful tran­si­tion from pri­ma­ry to sec­ondary school.There are many more sec­ondary-school places now than when Dr Er­ic Williams presided over the in­tro­duc­tion of the Com­mon En­trance Ex­am­i­na­tion in the ear­ly 1960s. Back then, large num­bers of stu­dents writ­ing the ex­am could not get a place in a sec­ondary school and many ei­ther dropped out or, if their par­ents could af­ford it, at­tend­ed a pri­vate sec­ondary in­sti­tu­tion.

To date, how­ev­er, the ed­u­ca­tion au­thor­i­ties are still un­able to spare SEA stu­dents from the over­whelm­ing fear many of them and their par­ents ex­pe­ri­ence over the pos­si­bil­i­ty of not do­ing well in the ex­am. Even with places avail­able for all, par­ents and chil­dren still fo­cus on­ly on the pres­tige schools, with fail­ure be­ing de­fined as hav­ing to set­tle for any of the rest of sec­ondary schools–a sor­ry state to be in af­ter 13 years of uni­ver­sal sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion.The prospect of be­ing stig­ma­tised as a fail­ure or dunce is very over­whelm­ing for chil­dren of SEA age, yet that is the one con­cern that still has not been erad­i­cat­ed by the switch from the Com­mon En­trance, the SEA's pre­de­ces­sor.When uni­ver­sal sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion was in­tro­duced in 2000, the promise was that the stress and pres­sure that had be­come a fea­ture of the Com­mon En­trance ex­am would thus be erad­i­cat­ed.How­ev­er, the re­ac­tion to Ques­tion 35 from chil­dren, par­ents and prin­ci­pals con­firms that in prac­tice that is def­i­nite­ly not the case.