Raphael John-Lall

All is set for next week Tues­day's Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am next week, says Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Fazal Karim. "All the nec­es­sary con­di­tions are in place for a suc­cess­ful SEA ex­am­i­na­tion," he said. He said 17,327 pupils would be writ­ing the ex­am­i­na­tion-8,787 boys and 8,540 girls. He was speak­ing at yes­ter­day's post- Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's. Karim said the three ar­eas pupils would be as­sessed in were math­e­mat­ics, lan­guage arts and cre­ative writ­ing. He added that in prepa­ra­tion for the ex­am­i­na­tion, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion had fo­cused on sev­er­al ar­eas, in­clud­ing suit­abil­i­ty of ex­am­i­na­tion cen­tres, train­ing of ex­am­i­na­tion peo­ple, se­cu­ri­ty arrange­ments for stor­age and re­turn of ex­am ma­te­ri­als, and mon­i­tor­ing of ad­min­is­tra­tion of SEA.

The ex­am cen­tres were al­so pre­pared, he added. "Stu­dents are re­quired to write the SEA ex­am at the pri­ma­ry schools they at­tend," the min­is­ter said. This year, a to­tal of 541 pri­ma­ry schools, com­pris­ing 477 gov­ern­ment and 64 pri­vate pri­ma­ry schools will be used as ex­am cen­tres. "An as­sess­ment of all schools to en­sure ad­e­quate light­ing and the phys­i­cal fa­cil­i­ties, in­clud­ing the toi­let fa­cil­i­ties and avail­abil­i­ty of a sup­ply of wa­ter, has been com­plet­ed, and they have been ap­proved as ex­am cen­tres by school su­per­vi­sors," he said.

The min­is­ter said arrange­ment for se­cu­ri­ty and trans­port for SEA par­tic­i­pants had been made as in pre­vi­ous years. He al­so said school su­per­vi­sors as­signed to dis­tri­b­u­tion points would man­age the de­liv­ery of ex­am ma­te­ri­als to ex­am­i­na­tion su­per­vi­sors. He said pro­vi­sion had al­so been made for stu­dents with med­ical con­di­tions, sen­so­ry dis­abil­i­ties, learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties and oth­er chal­lenges.