Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly says a letter was sent to the management of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) outlining recent concerns raised about inconsistencies with students’ CAPE and CSEC results.
Gadsby-Dolly said correspondence outlining several red flags was sent to CXC’s CEO and registrar Dr Wayne Wesley, who, despite this letter, did not acknowledge there were any formal complaints about anomalies with the results during a press conference yesterday.
According to Gadsby-Dolly, more feedback was being collected and compiled from school officials who queried this year’s results and this will also be sent to CXC’s management.
There have been mounting calls from students here in T&T and regionally for CXC to review the examination results, following questions over the grading scheme used and grades allocate to hundreds of students.
“Right now, we have approximately ten schools and we know we will have more who have submitted letters to the local registrar outlining queries at a school level and we will present that and whatever else is received, because we intend to send this second letter out by next week,” Gadsby-Dolly told Guardian Media.
“We are going to present that as school level queries. If a school is querying specific students that really underperformed based on their predictions, we will be presenting that based on what schools send to us.”
She said a request will also be made for clarity on how school-based assessments were marked, as this too was flagged by teachers and students.
“I did raise this in the ministers’ meeting and what was indicated to me was that this information is usually given after the query period has elapsed. But the query period is until October 23, so that is some time away so we will be asking for some type of indication about the moderated SBA result and we will be sending that forward next week.”
She also said CXC’s management will have to answer questions about the calculation of final grades and whether changes were made to the method customarily used.
Meanwhile, the ministry yesterday donated through its Adopt-a-School programme. The Cyril Ross Nursery, St Jude’s Home for Girls and Hope Centre received devices to facilitate online learning from Gadsby-Dolly and Minister Lisa Morris-Julian through kind donations of corporate sponsors.
Yesterday’s handing over ceremony at the ministry’s Port-of-Spain headquarters follows a similar event earlier this month where the ministry distributed 70 laptops for use by ECCE teachers and 98 laptops to public special schools for the use by children with special educational needs.