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#BTEditorial – CXC tail wagging the dog

by Barbados Today
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By now, most interested parties and even simple onlookers to the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) decision to go ahead with its 2022 examination schedule as though it is just another day in paradise across the region, must be scratching their heads in bemusement.

The demand from across the Caribbean to this regional institution that is based in Barbados, is that our children require more time to adequately prepare mainly for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) examinations.

They have called for a delay in the schedule of exams, some of which have already started.

Unlike the early years of CXC when students wrote one-shot examinations, today, attaining CXC success requires students and teachers to be more involved in extensive pre-examination work which comes in the form of school-based assessments (SBA).

Most parents will testify that SBAs can be as stressful as the main examination. And as many students have discovered, a poor showing on an SBA, could result in certain failure on the day of the exam despite achieving a passing grade for that portion of the test.

In fact, an incomplete SBA or a failed SBA is a failed examination.

The SBA factor often requires preparation of a separate assignment, and these are guided and assessed by teachers. And so, if teachers are saying to the CXC, they need more time because of the extraordinary circumstances of the past two years, why is the institution called CXC, so unyielding.

Why is the body, which has been the target of student and parent protests, legal action, condemnation by teachers’ unions, and education ministers, being so hard-nosed about its scheduling?

How would a three-or four-week postponement tarnish CXC’s reputation as a credible examinations body?

More importantly, we are forced to ask why is the tail wagging the dog? For whom does the CXC exists and to whom does this organisation answer?

The Caribbean Coalition for Exam Redress led by vocal parent activist Paula-Anne Moore, took the bold step of seeking redress from the law courts.

Though no success was garnered there for the affected students, she continues to crusade to get the CXC to become more student-focused and sensitive to the needs of its constituents.

She has now joined the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT), The Barbados National Council of Parent-Teacher Associations (BNCPTA), The Caribbean Union of Teachers (CUT)  and even Jamaican Minister of Education Fayval Williams in again demanding the CXC act with some heart and empathy for the children.

So concerned at the state of affairs, Williams has made a call for the urgent summoning of a meeting of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD). That body, ironically, is chaired by our Minister of Education Kay McConney.

She was spurred by recent findings from Jamaica’s National Secondary Students’ Council which uncovered that some 1 754 students out of the 2 812 who were questioned said they needed more time to ready themselves for the CXC exams.

Granted that anyone who could have more time to prepare for an exam would request it, we cannot ignore the situation that most of us in this region have faced, including our children.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is on a new wave in Barbados with infection rates now higher than at the peak of the disease’s impact on the island, is a real thing – for the doubters at CXC.

Most students who are expected to write the May/June exams, which CXC insists, will continue as planned, have not enjoyed not even six full months of face-to-face engagement with their teachers.

Online teaching and learning are still works in progress and there is nothing to suggest that the online format is an ideal replacement, particularly when the testing process has not taken into consideration that teaching and learning were considerably upended.

There are many children in Barbados, and we believe, across the Caribbean, whose education was cut short by the pandemic and may never attain this level of secondary school certification.

Unless Caribbean Governments, through their Ministers of Education, are able to exercise some clout on the administrators of the CXC and bring them around to understanding that they are in service to the region and not the other way around, we are bound to find ourselves down this road again.

We simply cannot afford to lose further confidence in an institution that seems to be so rigid and protective of itself, that it is prepared to sacrifice our children and their future.

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