Dear Editor,
The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), the regional body with the responsibility of creating, administering and marking the examinations needed for evaluation of secondary level competency, has announced that the results of this year’s examinations will be made available to their candidates (the students who wrote exams in May/June of this year) at 18:00 hrs (06:00 pm), on Thursday.

As usual, this year’s results are highly anticipated, as many students await their results to affirm all the hard work and dedication they would have put in over the past two to three years.
This year, however, there is an underlying factor that makes the anticipation of the results even more suspenseful, and that is the modified approach used to grade this year’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) General Mathematics exam.

For context, all CXC examinations are graded using CXC’s assessment policy, to provide an overall passing grade of Grades I-III. This assessment policy includes a minimum of three papers, each of which possess varying question types.

These three papers are the Paper One (which are generally multiple-choice), Paper Two (constructed response paper; short answer and essay-type questions), and a Paper Three, referred to as the School-Based Assessment (SBA).

It is publicly known that each of these three papers represent a fixed percentage of the student/candidate’s final grade, with the Papers One, Two and Three representing 30 per cent, 50 per cent and 20 per cent of the final grade respectively (note, for some subjects, the percentages may vary slightly as the SBA component percentage may have a higher or lower percentage allocation).

This year, CXC announced that there was a breach in the security of the CSEC Mathematics examination that saw the Paper Two examination being leaked to the public.
CXC was able to determine that the leak originated from Jamaica; however, as the paper was already written by candidates across the region and the extent to which the leaked paper could not be determined, CXC decided to omit the Paper Two completely, declaring that the grading for CSEC Mathematics will take on a “Modified Approach”.

Essentially, CXC’s modified approach will entail doubling the percentages of the Paper One and Paper Three (SBA) for that examination only, meaning that for CSEC Mathematics, they will constitute 60 per cent and 40 per cent of the overall grade of the examination.

The last time such a modified approach was done was in 2020, where CXC decided to omit all Paper Two examinations due to the difficulties faced across the region attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many will recall that upon the release of the results in 2020, students from multiple schools across the region, even in Guyana, were dissatisfied with their results as they felt that the grades received were not an accurate reflection of the work they put into their examinations.

The Guyanese Ministry of Education stood behind the students and teachers who felt that way, and CXC encouraged stakeholders to pursue reviews for their examinations.
What was found was that many students who reviewed their examination grades in that year, received upon the successful completion of their review, either an improved grade or a grade in general, for those who previously were marked as “ungraded”.

No one knows what happened internally at CXC during that year (at least, in the public realm) that caused such a massive discrepancy in the results released preliminarily and the actual official results of the candidate, but what the major concern is for this year is whether a repeat of the 2020 results fiasco will occur once more.
Another point of contention is that CXC’s use of the modified approach for this year’s Mathematics examination is isolated only to that particular examination.

In contrast, in 2020 all the examinations written at that time used a modified approach, meaning that all the results released for that year can be considered as standardised.
This year, we will have one of the major subjects required for matriculation being graded differently than all the other examinations.

I will not comment on the importance of standardised grading across examinations as opinions tend to vary, but what I personally will look forward to, and I know that other teachers and education officials will do the same, is CXC’s analysis of the mathematics overall pass rate and grade distribution compared to previous years.
All eyes will be on CXC tomorrow, and I am hopeful that this time, for the sake of our students, teachers and parents, CXC gets it right.

Yours truly,
Noah Rajak