Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.
By Paula-Anne Moore
“There is a collective consciousness and understanding and realisation that the current educational construct must be reimagined, reformed and repositioned, particularly educational assessment.” – Dr Wayne Wesley, Registrar & CEO of CXC, at the 48th International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA) annual conference Kingston, 24-29 September 2023.
The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) and CARICOM must be commended for being selected as the host of the 48th International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA), particularly during the celebration of CXC’s 50th year of existence.
However, these dual achievements must be tempered by the deep sorrow due to the recent decline in the CARICOM public’s trust and confidence in CXC, due to significant challenges in exam administration annually from 2020 to 2023. CXC’s reputation and credibility in the eyes of the public have been diminished, and this may be very likely one major reason for the significant decline in CXC’s exam candidates annually since 2020, now the lowest ever in 2023, as families explore options.
Maybe that drop in revenue may force a change in approach where student anguish did not.
How can we pursue increased digitisation in education assessment, thus effectively pouring the old wine of CXC’s exam administration into the new wineskin of widescale digitisation of exam assessments, given the current evidence of intractable obvious challenges that remain?
CARICOM governments have allowed CXC to continue with ineffective self-governance; limited public accountability, transparency and stakeholder engagement; challenges in exam paper security; major problems with the quality assurance to minimise errors in grading and exam papers and communications with its key stakeholders – students, parents and teachers.
These are exam testing fundamentals which surely should be of the highest quality, in accordance with international best practice standards, with the requisite resources assigned thereto, before assessment digitisation is chased, cost savings notwithstanding.
The 2022 e-testing fiasco in Barbados should be a cautionary tale, demonstrating the inevitable poor consequence of mismatching great ambition with lesser IT capacity. It was an unnecessary added burden to children and school principals within the pandemic environment.
The foregoing issues, which have disadvantaged hundreds of thousands of our CARICOM children annually over the past four academic years, have significantly damaged public trust and confidence in the entire public education system.
Those who wish not to bring public light to these challenges for fear that it may damage CXC’s credibility abroad forget that ‘home drums beat first’. Covering up the wound will lead only to its festering.
More attention needs to be given to fixing the clear problems revealed annually, which have led to sustained damage to the CARICOM public’s confidence in the administration of CXC’s exams, and ‘damage control’ communication of these efforts to the public.
Any attempt to transform the national and regional public education systems, without including an effective independent review of both CXC’s internal exam processes and CXC’s external interactions with the Ministries of Education and other education stakeholders in the delivery of its exam assessment processes, and greater respect demonstrated by comprehensive two-way communication with students and parents, will be doomed to ultimate failure. Instead, alternate exam bodies will be sought.
More parents need to fearlessly demand justice for their children, model this behaviour to their children, teach their children that they have a fundamental right to fairness, and hold our governments accountable. The teachers’ unions have done their part.
On this day, 28th September, the third anniversary of Barbados’ national public protests of children and their parents – CARICOM’s largest – responding to unjust CXC grading and callous communication where the traditional vehicles for advocacy were unfit for purpose, we ask ourselves: what has changed since then?
Based on the 2023 public outcry, particularly in Barbados, regarding too many grading problems traumatising too many children at too many schools, nationally and regionally, it seems as if we are continuing to repeat the same (or new) errors in CXC exam administration that were spectacularly revealed throughout CARICOM, on September 28, 2020.
When do we say enough is enough?
Our children deserve better.
Paula-Anne Moore is a parent advocate as well as spokesperson/coordinator of the Group of Concerned Parents, Barbados and the Caribbean Coalition for Exam Redress.
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