–Over 90 per cent of exam reviews completed

HAVING gotten feedback on over 90 per cent of the review requests made to the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), the Ministry of Education is mulling when to announce the names of those students who received the most Grade Ones for the 2020 examinations.
Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, shared with the media on Tuesday that the ministry is contemplating making the announcement today, if it knows for sure that the results that have been released will not be affected by pending reviews.

“We are presently compiling data that should allow us to make some announcement tomorrow. We’re hoping to be able to get enough data to be able to say to you by tomorrow, whether, from that data, if we feel comfortable saying who is the student with the most [Grade] Ones,” Minister Manickchand said.
Speaking with the media on the sidelines of a sod-turning exercise on Tuesday, Minister Manickchand revealed that Guyana has thus far received responses to 93 per cent of the review requests for the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) and 96 per cent of the review requests for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Examination.
“For CAPE, we have gotten 93 per cent of our requests, and for the numbers outstanding, we have 33 reviews for Guyana left to be done. For CSEC, it’s 96 per cent, and we have 120-something that are outstanding to be done,” the Minister explained.

Customarily, the MoE would announce the students who got the most Grade Ones at the regional CSEC examination and CAPE after the preliminary results would have been released by CXC.
However, while the preliminary results for the 2020 exams were released since September 2020, CXC faced massive backlash over what many students and other stakeholders deemed were unjustifiably lower-than-expected grades; there was also an unusually high number of ungraded results. The issue persisted in countries across the Caribbean where the exams were written.
CXC received an unprecedented number of reviews from Guyana and the other countries. As such, the MoE took the decision to withhold announcing a student, pending the outcome of the reviews.

“To announce anything would be reckless, because during that review process, we have had several changes. To announce somebody as having the most ‘Ones’ and somebody applies for a review, and that changes, that could be psychologically damaging for both students that would have been affected. So we want to be careful with that,” Minister Manickchand explained.
However, with most of the reviews already in, she said that the MoE is currently assessing the outstanding reviews to see if they would have any bearing on the results that have already been completed. “For example, if the remaining students to be reviewed only wrote 12 subjects, and even if we assumed they were getting ‘Ones’ in the reviews, they still will not reach the student with 21 subjects, then we could do the announcement. If, however, there is a student with 20 ‘Ones’ waiting for a review of two subjects, we can’t make the announcement, because things may change,” the Minister further clarified.