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Saturday, July 19, 2025

Central schools cry foul

by

20140704

A quar­rel is brew­ing be­tween pri­ma­ry schools in cen­tral Trinidad and the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry over what ap­pears to be in­equitable and ques­tion­able mark­downs for their stu­dents in the cre­ative-writ­ing seg­ment of the Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am­i­na­tion.It came a day af­ter the SEA re­sults were an­nounced on Wednes­day.The top per­form­ing Ch­agua­nas Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry has tak­en the lead in ques­tion­ing the marks for their stu­dents in the CAC, a sys­tem of mark­ing stu­dents for course work which was ex­per­i­men­tal­ly in­tro­duced in se­lect­ed sub­ject ar­eas.The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion's aim is to re­place the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion, deemed high­ly stress­ful on stu­dents, with the CAC.

Richard Ho­sein, pres­i­dent of Ch­agua­nas Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry's Par­ent/Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, yes­ter­day dis­patched a let­ter to chief ed­u­ca­tion of­fi­cer Har­ri­lal Seecha­ran re­quest­ing a meet­ing to dis­cuss the mat­ter.Ho­sein said mod­er­a­tors from the min­istry took sam­ples of the stu­dents' cre­ative-writ­ing course­work and marked them.He said par­ents now be­lieved the marks giv­en by the mod­er­a­tors were ad­just­ed for the SEA re­sults.He added: "Out of the 122 stu­dents from our school who wrote the SEA, 62 went in with 50 out of 50 marks sub­mit­ted by the teach­ers. When the SEA re­sults came out they got 43.36 out of 50."We want to know why such a steep mark­down. It could have af­fect­ed the stu­dents' place­ment and their chances of mak­ing it in the top 100 SEA stu­dents."

Ho­sein said Mon­trose Gov­ern­ment and Long­denville Gov­ern­ment al­so suf­fered the same fate.On the oth­er hand, Ho­sein said Grant Memo­r­i­al Pres­by­ter­ian, of San Fer­nan­do, which pro­duced one of the top three SEA stu­dents, got a min­i­mal mark­down."Their stu­dents got a 48.5 av­er­age out of 50."San Fer­nan­do TML Pri­ma­ry al­so got an av­er­age of 49.5, he said.Ch­agua­nas Gov­ern­ment pro­duced the top three SEA stu­dents in 2011 and in the fol­low­ing years had the most stu­dents in the top 200.The T&T Guardian un­der­stands there were al­so sim­i­lar queries in the Vic­to­ria, St Patrick and South East­ern Ed­u­ca­tion dis­trict of­fices yes­ter­day.Some schools on the East-West Cor­ri­dor, like St Joseph TML, al­so ques­tioned the "mod­er­a­tion" of their stu­dents' marks in the cre­ative-writ­ing as­pect of the ex­am.But oth­er pri­ma­ry schools along the cor­ri­dor com­mend­ed the in­tro­duc­tion of the CAC, which they said helped stu­dents to im­prove their over­all marks.


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