IN THE run-up to the last general election when political promises were suffocating the atmosphere, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) scored some points by advocating free secondary education for all. The People's National Party (PNP), caught off balance, countered by promising to phase in free secondary education over three years, agreeing in the interim that the Government would pay CXC exam fees for selected subjects including English, mathematics, information technology (IT) and one science subject.
Now that the 2004 CXC results are out, it appears that the method adopted by the Government to fulfil its promise was seriously flawed. Millions of taxpayers dollars went down the drain because hundreds of students applied for the funds to pay the fees and then failed to turn up for the exams. The fees are turned over by the schools to the CXC administration in Barbados and are not likely to be refunded as suggested by Senator Anthony Johnson, the JLP spokesman on education. The situation was particularly acute in the case of IT for which exam 48 per cent of the students failed to show and, of those who did sit the exam, more than half failed it.
The pass rate this year in mathematics is reported to be 25 per cent and 39 per cent in English and even this is overstated since passes are calculated as a percentage of children sitting the exam rather than on the total cohort. We have already published analyses showing why this is not statistically acceptable since school principals can exercise their individual discretion as to how many pupils can sit the exam. Even so, by comparison with 2003 on the same basis, the announced pass rate in mathematics was 36 per cent and 45 per cent in English so there has been a fall-off of 11 points in mathematics and 6 points in English.
To compound these disappointing results, it appears that the Government has paid out over $1 million in fees for the IT exam, wasted money because many students did not show up for the exam. This is not acceptable and we agree with the suggestion put forward by Howard Campbell, an IT practitioner, that if the Government is going to continue paying exam fees, the method of doing so must be changed. He recommends that instead of paying these fees up front, it should reimburse students only if they pass the exam. This makes a great deal of sense and we hope that the Government will take the recommendation on board.
Of course, the analysis is now being done to ascertain why so many students failed to sit the exams for which they would have spent considerable time preparing to write and why so many failed. Whatever the reasons, the society cannot continue to throw money down the drain at the present rate. We must get value for money from our education system and a proper study is needed to ascertain just where we are going wrong. We cannot continue like this.
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