Since School was closed on March 13 ,2020 and CSEC and CAPE ex­ams were rough­ly sched­uled to start around May 11 it means that stu­dents would have lost about two months of prepa­ra­tion. I have con­sid­ered the pro­pos­al by the CXC body to have a mul­ti­ple-choice ex­am­i­na­tion and a Pa­per 3 and SBA’s for pri­vate can­di­dates and school stu­dents re­spec­tive­ly.

I con­tend that the mul­ti­ple-choice ex­am is a wa­ter­ing down of the prop­er eval­u­a­tion of stu­dents and that the full Pa­per 1, Pa­per 2 and Pa­per 3 ex­ams should be set as nor­mal.

My pro­pos­al is that all sec­ondary schools should be prop­er­ly sani­tised and on­ly CSEC and CAPE stu­dents should be ad­mit­ted for the pe­ri­od of two months, which were lost, in prepa­ra­tion for the ex­am­i­na­tions.

Stu­dents and all school per­son­nel should wear their masks and prac­tice so­cial dis­tanc­ing where pos­si­ble. The first row of desks in each class should be va­cant and on­ly one stu­dent should be as­signed to a desk. The class size should, there­fore, be re­duced by at least 50 per cent.

Since the whole school is emp­ty, ex­cept for the ex­am­i­na­tion stu­dents, then there should be suf­fi­cient class­rooms avail­able to ac­com­mo­date all. At the end of the two month pe­ri­od, ex­am­i­na­tions should be­gin with the same time se­quence as was pro­posed in May 2020.

For this to hap­pen, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion should re­quest all schools to be opened dur­ing the first week of June, for CSEC and CAPE stu­dents on­ly, for san­i­ti­za­tion and prepa­ra­tion. Fol­low­ing this, eight weeks of class­es should be held to pre­pare stu­dents for the ex­ams. Ex­am­i­na­tions should then be held dur­ing the sec­ond week of Au­gust.

Stu­dents would be ex­am­ined in all the pa­pers as nor­mal­ly set and hope­ful­ly, re­sults would be re­leased some­time in Sep­tem­ber/ Oc­to­ber.

This method would re­quire CSEC and CAPE teach­ers to come out dur­ing the month of Ju­ly and maybe one week in Au­gust.

Why not? Stu­dents would be prop­er­ly pre­pared for the ex­am­i­na­tions and would have re­cap­tured the time lost as a re­sult of the COVID clo­sure .

This ad­di­tion­al time would al­low stu­dents to fin­ish their SBA’s with the as­sis­tance of their teach­ers. WHY NOT?

Choy Man­zano

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