St. Kitts and Nevis (WINN)—Officials at the Caribbean Examinations Council CXC are raising concerns over the growing number of students who are not showing up for examinations, along with increasing cases of exam irregularities.
During this year’s May-June sitting, CXC reported that more than 30,000 students were absent from the various examinations across the region.
CXC’s Director of Operations, Nicole Manning, presented the findings during a ceremony in Anguilla to officially release this year’s examination results.
“This is a big concern of the Caribbean Examinations Council and continues to be a concern for us. The absenteeism where we have, while it is reducing, we had 3,534 candidates at the level at Cape being absent. Now, what does this mean for candidates? A candidate who is absent has no opportunity to be graded because they have missed a component and cannot be graded. So that candidate would have lost out on that opportunity.”
The number of students failing to turn up for exams is a growing concern for the council.
Manning said CXC is working with education officials across the region to better understand the reasons behind the absenteeism and address the issue at the local level.
“For CSEC, it’s even more worrying. 32,403 candidates not turning up for exams is something that the education system across the region has to be concerned about. It is something that the Caribbean Examinations Council is concerned about, and we are working very hard to encourage our candidates to turn up. Parents, guardians, turn up. We are encouraging our educators to encourage these students to turn up. We have done many surveys, and the surveys tell us that sometimes candidates just feel that they’re unprepared and decide not to turn up. This is not a reason to be absent. Just try. As we say, nothing beats a try. That’s right. The CCSLC, while the absenteeism may not look so great, but percentile-wise this is a worrying concern too.”
The concern is particularly noticeable among boys, with CXC data showing that girls continue to turn up for examinations at a higher rate than their male counterparts.
“We move to the gender; we have been kind of showing what is happening where the gender balance is concerned, and we have found that this is representative of what happens, to get less and less as you go higher. So we saw 62% of females sitting CAPE and 38% of the males. But look at what existed at CSEC. We had 59% females and 41% males. It gets a little different again. Females: 48 at CCSLC and 52%. Let me pause here. Remember the candidates who are sitting CCSLC are predominantly between the first three years in secondary school. So you can well imagine at the primary level where they’re pretty much dead on equal. Then moving to secondary and post-secondary, somehow the disparity appears. It’s important for us to do that deep dive and understand, and I can tell you I have no apologies for this. For me, men are born leaders, and we have to respect that and help them to stay in that place.”
Manning says the council is aware of disparities and is working to identify and remove barriers that may prevent students from fully participating in the examination process.
“This disparity has come about for whatever reason, and together as educators we are going to try and see what we can do to ensure that the candidates, students, our own children that start at the primary level 50-50, we remove that disparity from 62-38. I know you’re going to work with us. I want to also point out another very important group for the Carbon Examinations Council. There are candidates that require special assessment arrangements. The Carbon Examinations Council sees this as serving as our duty of care, and so we have 20 opportunities, 20 provisions for candidates. It may be that the candidates need additional time for whatever reason. You have different candidates that our medical doctors may say that they need a different test on somebody to read, for example. While we do Braille, we still sometimes see where candidates may need additional assistance, and so this year we saw 16 territories requiring candidates to utilise this particular provision, 17 of the 20 provisions for CSEC, and eight territories had candidates who utilised 14 of the 20 provisions for CAPE. Now this is very important to us, and it’s something that we’re going to be sharing more of for the education system to adopt the same provisions that the Caribbean Examinations Council utilises in our assessment process. As Dr Wesley mentioned, our educational assessment regional focus is where we everything we have we share with the education system free of cost because we want to ensure that those standards remain the same in teaching, learning and assessment.”
Education officials across the region will now have to take stock of the findings and look at ways to address the challenges contributing to absenteeism and other issues affecting students.
