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The 2018 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and CAPE examination results have been the best this country has seen in the last decade.
While this has been good news for Education Minister Anthony Garcia, it has also created cause for concern, as 1,486 of the 16,042 CSEC students in government and government-assisted schools who sat the examinations this year did not obtain a pass mark in any subject area.
At a press conference at his ministry yesterday, Garcia assured that his ministry has rolled out a number of initiatives that will bring better CSEC results in 2019.
Garcia attributed a number of factors for the unsuccessful students, ranging from students not being able to cope academically, abject poverty, lack of reading materials in some homes and weak family structures.
In giving a breakdown of the results, Garcia said 60.78 per cent of CSEC students obtained a full certificate, while 56.47 per cent of students were able to attain five subjects which included English and Mathematics.
In 2017, the ministry had recorded 1,725 CSEC students scoring a zero pass rate.
Chief Education Officer Harrilal Seecharan said the ministry had recorded the highest CESC pass rate with five and more subjects in the last ten years.
Seecharan said 60.78 per cent of students who wrote the examination obtained five and more subjects, while 56.47 per cent got five and more with Mathematics and English.
He said the pass rates in 14 subjects in 2018 were higher than last year’s.
Seecharan noted that 51.93 per cent of boys who wrote the CSEC examination in 2018 “got five and more (subjects) with Maths and English, compared to last year’s 47.88 per cent.
“This has been an improvement.”
“Both at CSEC and CAPE this year we had performances that exceeded the past ten years. In other words, we’ve had the best results in the past ten years this year,” Seecharan boasted.
Seecharan said a number of the 1,400 unsuccessful CSEC students also sat subjects in the Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ) this year.
“So many of those students not passing CSEC subjects may have been successful in the CVQ subjects,” Seecharan said, which would change the pass rate figures significantly when the CVQ results are announced.
Garcia said the results of the CAPE examination continue to be excellent.
This year, he said in Unit 1 of CAPE, 95.31 per cent of students achieved a passing grade, stating that this figure showed a slight improvement compared to last year’s figure of 95.06 per cent.
The 95.31 per cent represented “22,381 subject entries,” Garcia said.
In Unit 2, of the 11,128 subject entries, Garcia said 94.7 per cent of the received a passing grade. Last year, 94.44 per cent of the students had obtained a passing grade.
“Of the 32 subjects written by our students…26 of these subjects had students scoring more than 90 per cent,” Garcia said.