EDUCATION Minister Priya Manickchand has confirmed that the Ministry of Education (MoE) is awaiting the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC)’s completion of the ongoing review of Guyana’s results before publicly releasing data from the examinations.

Following the September 22, 2020 release of the results for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE), several students, schools and countries have challenged the grades issued.

In Guyana, individual students as well as the Government, through the MoE, had requested official reviews of some of the results. Minister Manickchand established that it would be unfair to the students to release the results, when other students are awaiting reviews.
“Entire schools and students have appealed their CXC grades, and we thought it prudent to wait until those appeals come back in. We don’t want to have people disappointed; we will just await on CXC official release of results, or we could make the announcement, if all the reviews [for Guyana] are back in,” the minister noted.
She added: “We have students with 20 ‘Ones’, but then we may have a girl with 17 ‘Ones’ and four ‘Twos’ who is reviewing that; it would be harmful to both of them if we announce one student as the top student, and then taking it away next two weeks.”

CXC customarily releases preliminary results, which is followed by a review process before the official declaration of final results. This year, the deadline for submitting requests for queries and reviews of the preliminary results ends on October 23, and the first official results from CXC is scheduled to be released from November 6.
Guyana is one of several nations across the Caribbean region challenging the results, where proponents are claiming mass discrepancies such as a high number of ungraded results, and alleged unjustified lower-than-expected grades.

Complainants believe that the discrepancies are due to the Council administering a modified version in 2020 of its customary annual CSEC and CAPE, which were to exclude the regular Paper Two component.
CXC has since convened an independent team to holistically review the Council’s 2020 examinations, with the team expected to report to the CXC chairman by Friday, October 16.
In Guyana, 20 schools made official reports to the MoE of unprecedented numbers of “ungraded” results across 15 subject areas, while 24 schools have requested reviews for unsatisfactory results across 20 subject areas for CSEC, and six schools submitted requests for a review of unsatisfactory results in seven subject areas for CAPE.

SETTLED
Of the 20 schools reporting a high number of “ungraded” results, the minister confirmed that 12 have thus far had their situations settled.
The minister clarified, however, that some of the factors that caused the students “ungraded” results were on the part of Guyana, when it came to the submission of the School Based Assessments (SBAs) for CSEC students, and Internal Assessments (IAs) for CAPE students.

“Of the 20 schools that got ungraded, we’ve gotten back results for 12 now, but we have discovered that many of those schools did not submit the SBAs, or did not submit them properly. So that is something that we have to manage better at the Ministry of Education,” the minister explained.
She continued: “We have discovered locally that some of it can be attributed to our systems and our schools, and a failure on the part of the ministry to properly administer the SBAs. We have to make sure that we ensure our teachers submit what they’re supposed to submit.”