Ministry of Education to engage CXC on possible grade changes for students
(September 24, 2020) – The Ministry of Education – Guyana is registering vehemently with the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC), its dissatisfaction with the apparent poor grading of students at the 2020 CSEC and CAPE examinations.
The Ministry of Education is concerned that there seems to be discrepancies with the grades that were awarded in particular subject areas to students across the country. The Honourable Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand has since spoken to the Registrar of CXC and has expressed her concerns. That conversation will be followed up by a letter addressing the many complaints and a demand to have them addressed.
The complaints by students, parents and teachers, backed by statistics range from:
– Discrepancies in teachers’ projected grades and CXC final awards being significant in the results of many students.
– Maximum SBA scores having been attained by students who believe strongly that they answered the multiple-choice questions (many of which were questions repeated from previous years) correctly and yet they received poor grades.
– students of schools that have been historically, performing optimally in these examinations have been awarded poor grades at this year’s CSEC and CAPE results which represent a stark deviation from the norm. Nothing else in those schools have changed including the teachers.
– the same students in year one CAPE who did excellently, scored poorly in year two.
– Schools which submitted all of the SBAs within the timeframe and received confirmation emails from CXC and receive an ungraded result in some subject areas.
– There were unacceptable grades for Integrated Mathematics, Pure Maths papers one and two and Caribbean Studies at many schools.
Students in Guyana and across the region are currently traumatised and disenchanted, something we cannot accept. This Ministry of Education will leave no stone unturned and will pursue solutions with CXC until there is an acceptable resolution to the matter. We are still receiving more complaints and gathering information. The Minister of Education is going to aggressively pursue this matter with CXC in the best interest of the nation’s children.