The Queen’s College (QC) is demanding that the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) conducts a regrading of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) following reports of apparent discrepancies in results.
Making the call today was QC’s External Examinations Coordinator, Samantha Liverpool, who expressed confidence that the results obtained by students do not reflect their performance.
“We demand a regrading…We’re asking that CXC do not carry out a simple reviewing of a paper to check for scores,” Liverpool said to applause from the attendees.
A request was also made for the marking scheme to be provided to the college.
Liverpool said that no such document has been provided as yet.
The Coordinator said that her heart goes out to the students, whom she described as being in a “depressed mode”.
“We can’t have that. They’re already going through enough as a society,” she said.
Liverpool said that CXC has a role to play in ensuring that students move forward in their academic careers, and therefore the Council must prove what went wrong.
In fact, CXC receives a payment of $15M annually from the college.
“We believe that because we are paying, we need to get service. CXC, we are your customers,” Liverpool said.
The college has created a system which allows students to lodge complaints or queries regarding their grades.
The Education Ministry recently issued a statement expressing dissatisfaction with the apparent poor grading of students at the 2020 CSEC and CAPE examinations.
The Ministry said that it is concerned that there seems to be discrepancies with the grades that were awarded in particular subject areas to students across the country.
Education Minister, 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 received 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
