Electronic marking of NGSA proven successful

The Ministry of Education this year utilized the electronic marking system to mark paper 1 of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) which was released on Tuesday during a Press Conference at the National Centre for Education and Resource Development (NCERD).

Superintendant Examinations Division, Saudia Kadir noted that there were no difficulties with the new system which is enabled through collaboration with the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), therefore the Ministry will continue to utilize it in the coming years.

“We went through the process and we had many stages of verification, onto the end when we had our final results. We would like to continue this partnership for a couple of years until our systems here have gained all the necessary levels we will like to have regionally and internationally” Kadir said.

Questions were raised in relation to the time taken to release the results, however, Chief Education Officer, Olato Sam assured that the results were released in tandem with the usual eight weeks period.

“If you check the time, it’s actually consistent with past years. The only difference this year was that they wrote the assessment three weeks later than the average time. We took the same amount of time; about eight weeks to get the results prepared,” Sam explained.

The National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) was written on April 27 and 28, 2016, as opposed to being in March.

Sam noted that “the efficiency that we have gained with the electronic marking has been noted and we’re going to employ some of those techniques but the time in relation to verification and all of the other checks and balances that are required, that is something that we want to preserve to ensure that we get the correct and most reliable results at the end of this experience.”

The Ministry said it is collaborating with CXC to improve the quality of all primary grade assessments with the aim of ensuring all “assessments conform to regional and international test development and administration standards and expectations to facilitate consistent, reliable measurement and tracking of pupil performance.”

Minister of Education, Dr. Rupert Roopnarine said teachers, subject’s specialists and test development officers from Guyana would have developed all items for the 2016 NGSA, with the technical guidance of CXC, addressing key areas such as item construction, weighing of items, sampling, and other psychometric elements.

The ministry is currently conducting a full analysis of the 2016 NGSA results.