Minister of Education Dr. Nyan Gadsby-Dolly has confirmed that the Government will pay for students to have their Caribbean Secondary Entrance Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams (CAPE) results queried.
Her announcement follows a similar stance taken by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley who agreed to cover the fees of students who wish to query their results from the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC).
CXC has agreed to halve the fee to US$15 even though many regional education bodies have called for a full waiver of the fee when they met with CXC on Monday.
If CXC does not remove the cost of the query fees, the Government may have to pay over TT$650,000 to cover the cost, since over 5000 query requests were submitted- 2,352 for CSEC and 3,325.
This represents an over 75% increase in query requests when compared to a total of 1,286 queries received in 2019.
CXC is yet to respond to the request for the waiver, however, it has extended the date of requests to November 6.
The queries stemmed from concerns raised in the public domain in September with respect to the systems used by CXC to grade CSEC and CAPE exams as many students were unhappy with their poor grades.
An Independent Review Team was established to assess the modified approach for the administration of the exams, the moderation process applied to the School-Based Assessment (SBA), and the grading process for the examinations, among other related matters.
The findings revealed that there were communication issues relating to the administration of the exams, which were further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The review team also considered whether the modified grading system used had an effect on the final grades.
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