BASSETERRE, ST. KITTS, APRIL 12TH 2010 (CUOPM) – Hundreds of St. Kitts and Nevis students along with thousands from the region will soon benefit from an easier to follow and more efficient layout and design of a new front page, added elements of schools’ reports and other new features of the Caribbean Examinations Council’s (CXC) past papers booklets.
This was revealed by Registrar at CXC in Barbados, Didacus Jules, who said that the publication of the schools’ reports “is a very significant step forward because these reports are prepared by the examining committee for each subject in every examination.”
This would therefore go a long way towards helping teachers and students because the reports reveal how candidates are performing in that particular subject, which helps teachers to hone weak areas of the students as expressed in the examination.
“For example, from several preceding years, the examination panel in Geography kept pointing to the need for improved map reading by the students and the schools apparently finally did pay attention to that guidance and we saw in last year’s examination, significant improvement in performance because attention had been given to improving the map reading skills,” Jules is quoted in a regional media story as stating.
Jules said that he was happy to be launching these booklets in conjunction with Ian Randle Publishers (IRP). He said that IRP was chosen after a “transparent bidding process,” where regional and UK-based publishers competed to offer CXC a range of services. He said that his organisation was looking for a company that would meet international standards but as a regional body, they were also looking to support a fellow regional organisation and IRP fit the bill in both cases.
Jules added that CXC has granted IRP exclusive rights to publish their syllabuses and past examination papers for all CAPE and CSEC subjects.
They have also granted the Jamaican publishing company non-exclusive rights for the publication of all subject reports, related specimen papers and mark schemes for both examinations.
Barbados’ Chief Education Officer (Acting) of the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development, Laurie King, said that the publication of these past papers and school reports aligns with the mission and vision of the ministry in “creating a well-skilled, resource foundation on which we can build a knowledge-based economy that is internationally competitive.”
Apart from these booklets, King said that his ministry is “on the eve of signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Caribbean Examinations Council and the TVET Council in relation to Caribbean Vocational Qualifications (CVQ) being offered as an additional competency-based mechanism in our schools”.
This would require that proper mechanisms be implemented for such things as record keeping, since students who satisfy the matriculation requirements for the Level 1 CVQ will have to verify these competencies internally and externally and have them recorded.
