Failure of CXC system resulted in ungraded results; teachers, students not at fault

Minister of Education Priya Manickchand says that teachers and students are not to be blamed for the ungraded results that have been recorded at this year’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE).

Last year, over 20 schools received ungraded results and this was because teachers did not submit School-Based Assessments (SBAs) on time or not submitting them properly.

This year again, Guyana’s Ministry of Education is engaging the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) on this issue but Manickchand related that it does not appear as though the teachers are at fault.

“That is not what we are seeing this year, it was just a failure of the system to properly record what was submitted.

“I am not seeing a fault as yet,” Manickchand told reporters at the sidelines of an event on Thursday at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in Georgetown.

Further, she explained that an “ungraded” result means that there was a problem with the submission of the SBA and not that the students did not submit those SBAs.

Queen’s College in Georgetown and Cotton Field Secondary in Region Two are among the schools that have so far recorded ungraded results.

And Manickchand said that the ministry had spent the past 12 hours engaging all schools to ensure that the preliminary results “look like what we expect them to look like”.

Last year, all of the 3,000 queries raised about the results given for some Guyanese candidates were resolved. And Manickchand said this resulted in over 3,000 changes made to results.

Meanwhile, for this year’s exams, CXC would have introduced a number of flexibilities to address the issues faced by the COVID-19 pandemic. CXC reduced the requirements for the SBAs by as much as 50 per cent. The submission of SBAs was also delayed for six weeks.

Additionally, topics for the exams were released six weeks before and students further had the option to defer sitting the exams until next year if they were not confident of performing well. But a majority of Guyanese students wrote the exams this year.

This year, candidates will be able to access their results online from Friday evening. Additionally, if students and candidates still have concerns beyond those raised by the Ministries of Education, they have until November 15 to raise those queries or concerns.