#BTColumn – Scholarships and exhibitions 2021

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Adina Trim

At last, the long-awaited list of Barbados Scholarship and Exhibitions awardees was announced on December 31, 2021, some three months after the release of the CAPE results.
This was received with a mixture of joy and disappointment.

We are happy for the recognition given to those diligent and disciplined children who overcame the challenges of COVID 19 to excel.

We are disappointed that other equally diligent and disciplined children may have been denied the award they rightly deserved through the failure of the examining body, the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) to properly administer the 2020 CAPE and CSEC Examinations.

The Ministry of Education explained that the delay in the release of the 2021 awards was due to its consultation with CXC given that “the grades that some of our students received were not in alignment with expected grades”.

Students and parents were hopeful that the consultation with the CXC would address the concerns raised regarding the inconsistencies in the 2020 grades and the implications for the award of scholarships and exhibitions.

Readers will recall that a small group of concerned parents and students, led by Paula Anne Moore, sought to seek redress for students in the wake of the uproar attending the restructured 2020 CXC examinations, which failed to accurately reflect students’ true performance.

Following the 2020 examinations, students that were historically strong performers inexplicably received poor grades.

Consequently, the group of concerned parents sought to draw attention to the implications of CXC’s mismanagement of the 2020 examinations on the students’ chances of gaining a national award.

The 2020 results were at odds not only with the expectations of students and teachers but also with the students’ past academic performance. Many of these students displayed academic excellence at the Barbados Secondary School Examination and consistently excelled throughout their years in the secondary school system.

Unfortunately, despite robust protest from concerned students and parents across the Caribbean, CXC did not comply with demands to revisit its grading of the 2020 examinations and to address the perverse results for 2020.

Consequently, the 2020 results have disadvantaged students who would have been in line for scholarships and other awards.

Last year and this year’s awards reflect this (See Table). For 2021, 6 scholarships and 35 exhibitions were awarded and 11 scholarships and 18 exhibitions in 2020.

The only other year in which less than 10 scholarships were awarded was in 2016 (9). Over 20 scholarships were awarded in 2017, 2108 and 2019. Also worthy of note is that in 2020 only Harrison College (HC) received scholarships.

Queen’s College (QC), which has traditionally competed with HC for these, received none.

This year QC won 4 scholarships compared to HC’s 2 and the latter also gained an unprecedented number of exhibition awards (25). QC saw its receipt of exhibition awards fall from 17 in 2019 to three and four in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

Interestingly, years with high level of Exhibitions usually correlated with high level of scholarships except for 2021.

The national scholarship and exhibition awards peaked at 62 in 2019 with scholarships accounting for 43.5 per cent (27) of these.

Clearly 2020 and 2021 marked a departure from trend, and assuming the pandemic did not adversely affect the intelligence of our students and the awards criteria remained unchanged, one has to point to the perverse results of the 2020 examinations as an explanatory factor.
CXC was not the only examining body that had to modify its grading approach in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The United Kingdom initially used an algorithm to generate results for its students, but these produced nonsense results.

In the wake of howls of protest from students and schools, the education administrators in the UK took the bold decision to set these aside and use an approach that was more in line with historical performance and did not unfairly disadvantage students.

Clearly no such concerns seemed to have preoccupied CXC or those responsible for the oversight of this examining body. In fact, there was no attempt to allay the fears of the stakeholders that the perverse results of the 2020 Examinations would be remedied/corrected so that they did not adversely impact the assessment of the performance of students with respect to the granting of national scholarship and exhibition awards.

It is still not clear to what extent the aberrant results reported in 2020 skewed the overall results of candidates for the awards. It would be of interest to know the results of the said review of grades sought by the Ministry of Education.

While the granting of reduced numbers of scholarships and exhibitions would have been fortuitous for the government given the state of its finances, after working so hard to achieve excellence with the expectation that this will be rewarded, the hopes and aspirations of two cohorts of students, who either did not qualify for an award or received an award that was not in line with their demonstrated academic performance, were dealt a heavy blow.

While any financial support towards university education is welcomed, make no mistake the financial benefits associated with a scholarship and the options this give to the recipient vary significantly from that of the Exhibition.

The affected students are dismayed and disillusioned with the actions taken by those in authority to remedy the situation and to ensure the integrity and fairness of the examination process.

Over the last two years, our children have been taught a number of very hard lessons. Firstly, despite one’s best effort, hard work and consistency don’t always pay off. Secondly, you cannot always depend on those charged with doing the right thing to do so.

Thirdly, life is filled with disappointments and one needs to press on in spite of! One final lesson we hope that they have learned is that the fight for justice never ends!

This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.