The results and the education sector

Guyana is once again indulging in its annual over-the-top celebration of the results of our secondary school exams. As we wrote last year and so many years before: “Our obsession with results of exams taken in the Grade 11/Fifth Form, when our children are merely around sixteen years old, is a sign of our country’s repressed development. Like the results of the NGSA at the end of Grade 6, these exams, as well as those of CAPE at Grade 13, the excitement surrounds the top performers who will be the recipients of scholarships for furthering their studies.
“And it is this drive for scholarships – with a few exceptions – that will be pushing our high school graduates to write every increasing numbers of subjects at these exams. It is a sign of our poverty-stricken economic status, where most of our students know they cannot afford the tuition to top quality universities outside of Guyana.” Unfortunately, there have been intermittent but inconclusive debates about the pros and cons of having children being pushed to write subjects that have absolutely no substantive utility in the advancement of their career goals.
Take, for instance, the top CAPE student. She was quite candid that because her 20 subjects at CSEC – with 18 Grade 1’s — did not secure a scholarship, she turned to CAPE as a “second chance”. Desiring to be a medical doctor, she yet wrote Pure Mathematics; Applied Mathematics and Environmental Science to boost her numbers for the scholarship jackpot rather than for further preparatory “education” in her field. The top CSEC student’s experience illustrates the personal sacrifice demanded from the students to achieve their prodigious feats.
Attending the top secondary school, the student yet had to take lessons in the mornings; in the afternoons; on weekends; and, with his mother as schoolteacher quitting her job to devote her time full time to him, study regularly until 2:30 in the morning. These are students who know the loneliness of the long-distance runner because they have felt it. The effort has to take a toll that will manifest itself in the next tertiary stage of their education, where they have a high chance of suffering from “burnout”. Guyana has produced a string of “high flyers” at the CXC, CSEC exams over the past decade, and it might be useful to conduct a survey of those who have now completed their tertiary studies, on their assessment of their earlier marathon efforts.
Another point we have been making in this space over the annual exams hoopla has been for us to spare a thought for those outside the charmed top 5 per cent. As usual, the Ministry of Education has been focusing on issuing aggregate results up to Grade 3, which count as “passes”. By this measure, one learns there has been marginal improvement that has bumped “passes” into the high sixty percent range. But what should have been done was to reveal how many students actually “matriculated”, or received at least 5 subjects including English 1 and Pure Mathematics. After all, this is the minimum qualification to enter university for non-professional studies, and also for most non-manual jobs. Even aggregately, only 43% of passes were secured with at least a Grade 3 in Pure Mathematics.
We can perhaps get a flavour of the skewed performance from the fact that only 233 students out of 12,269 secured Grade 1 passes in eight or more subjects, while over 600 failed to secure even a Grade 3 in a single subject. And this number has to be viewed against an ever-decreasing number of students sitting the CSEC, from a high of 16,000 to now merely 12,000 countrywide. Did the “missing candidates” drop out of the school system?
It is rather serendipitous that the announcement of the lacklustre secondary school exam results coincides with that of the teachers union declaring they will be striking because of the impasse on salary increases. They are related.