Guyana sees marked improvement at CSEC Math this year
–but still needs to work on overall performance

THE Ministry of Education has reported that the 2014 May/June Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations recorded an improvement in several subject areas, as well as impressive progress in mathematics.

Speaking at a press briefing at the National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD) in Kingston, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand announced that mathematics still needs a lot of work, but the Grade 1 to 3 pass rate for 2014 is 38.7%, indicating a more than 9% improvement on 2013’s performance, where the Grades 1 to 3 pass rate was recorded at 28.92% – the best performing year recorded since 1990.

LESS THAN 50% PASSES IN MATHS
She also indicated that the Grades 1 to 3 performance in English A showed a marginal increase from 45.69% in 2013 to 46.98% in 2014, while performance in English B remained relatively constant. Manickchand indicated that while these two subjects showed an improvement, the overall pass rate, particularly for mathematics, remains unsatisfactory, with less than 50% passes.
Manickchand explained that in other parts of the Caribbean, students are only allowed to write Mathematics and English if they pass a pre-test; pointing out that every child in Guyana, regardless of performance, is allowed to write the subjects. “Guyana and the rest of the region were doing poorly in these two subject areas, and we decided that we need to do something; and we decided upon the pilot programme.”
She recalled that the pilot project was implemented in 2012 at forty-one schools to improve poor performances in several subject areas, especially mathematics and English, and the improvements recorded are partially on account of the project.
Minister Manickchand explained that the pilot project saw that “students in the forty-one schools were given additional materials like textbooks, geometry sets and calculators. “With this we were doing a lot of training and retraining of teachers and also the monitoring of the competency level of both teachers and students. And what we have reordered was that all the pilot schools have done remarkably well.”
“Let’s take English Language in Santa Rosa in Region 1 for example, in 2013, only 33% of their students passed compared to 47% that passed in 2014 , Aurora Secondary recorded an 18% pass in 2013 and a 21% pass in 2014 and these were pilot schools. East Ruimveldt Secondary, 4% of their students last year passed mathematics this year 41% of their students passed… these kinds of remarkable improvements didn’t happen by magic… the pilot project has done remarkably well and I think it is worthy of a national rollout,” Manickchand said.
Other subject areas that showed excellent improvement are Agriculture, Food and Nutrition, French, Home Economics Management, Information Technology, Physics, Religious Education, Theatre arts and Additional Mathematics, among others.
This year 13,724 students wrote CSEC examinations; 5,082 from private schools and 8,642 from public schools with 4,887 accounting for males and 8,837 accounting for females.

(By Rebecca Ganesh-Ally)