On July 1 officials from the Ministry of Education revealed the results of the 2019 Common Entrance Examination. Of the registered 2,993 students, 2,272 wrote the exam. The mean was the same as last year: 60.09%. Student scores ranged from 9% to 97%. Although used for many years, the exam has been criticized for placing too much pressure on students at an early age. Last month the Barbados prime minister, Mia Mottley, announced her government’s intention to look into replacing the exam.
“We have reached the point where we need to reject an approach to education that was settled by the British in the 1940s,” she told supporters at a rally. Mottley said her government would begin the conversation about abolishing the exam, and the start of the creation of middle schools where students will decide, at ages 13 and 14, where they wish to continue their schooling. She lamented that there is inequity in the exam and that children should not be discarded at 11 and 12 years old.
On Monday Saint Lucia’s education minister, Dr. Gale Rigobert, spoke briefly on the government’s plan for the Common Entrance Exam, as well as other exams carried out at the primary school level, and the curriculum as a whole. “We are at this time reviewing the various exams that our students have to write, at grade 2, grade 4 and grade 6 in particular,” she declared. “I would not want to pre-empt the outcome of the exercise but it is something which is very much in the forefront of our minds and forms part of any discussion we have with respect to the way forward for the sector and our strategic alignment with the vision and mission for the sector.”
She added that the review will be comprehensive and hoped the outcome of the exercise will result in “a feasible prescription that can work for the benefit of all stakeholders”. In grades 2 and 4, students write the Minimum Standards Exam, followed by the Common Entrance Exam in grade 6.
Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago both created their own replacements to the exam: the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) and the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) respectively. Whether the Saint Lucian government intends to do the same is unknown. Another possible alternative is the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment (CPEA). Developed by the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), the assessment utilizes continuous assessment of students from grades 5 to 6. Per CXC, it focuses on the four literacies: mathematical, language, civic and scientific. It comprises an internal assessment, which includes projects, book reports, writing portfolios and self-assessment, that accounts for 40% of the total score.
The external assessment, worth 60% of the final score, is an exam of 50 multiple-choice questions each, in the areas of Language Arts, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies. CPEA is used by Anguilla, Grenada, Montserrat and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
