Major discrepancies prompt Guyanese officials to ask CXC to review, change students’ grades

Two days after the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) released results for 2020 examinations, Guyana’s Ministry of Education has vehemently registered its dissatisfaction with the Council as it relates to the apparent poor grading of students.

The Ministry in a statement on Thursday said it is concerned that there seem to be discrepancies with the grades for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).

“Students in Guyana and across the region are currently traumatized 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,” the statement from the Education Ministry said.

The discrepancy, the Ministry explained, occurred 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 statement added.

The Ministry said it received complaints from students, parents and teachers, backed by statistics and those complaints include discrepancies in teachers’ projected grades and CXC final awards being significant in the results of many students.

“There are also cases where 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,” the statement added.

Additionally, 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 Ministry said too that the same students in year one CAPE who did excellently, scored poorly in year two.

It was also found that schools which submitted all of the SBAs within the timeframe and received confirmation emails from CXC, received an ungraded result in some subject areas while there were unacceptable grades for Integrated Mathematics, Pure Maths papers one and two and Caribbean Studies at many schools.

“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,” the statement added.