Devon Dick

In response to my article, 'GSAT: a way forward', published June 24, a Ministry of Education official called me to explain the marking mechanism and challenge my assertion about the system.

In that article, I argued that the problem with the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) marking system had to do with the weighting of communication task and nothing to do with the weighting of other subjects.

Pass or fail

The problem has to do with commu-nication task. It is the shortest examination, yet still if someone drops only one point, then it amounts to dropping almost eight per cent.

I, therefore, suggested that a way forward is to treat communication task like Use of English at University of the West Indies and score it as a pass or fail. Scoring it as a pass or fail would make it easier to calculate the percentage scores, remove subjectivity from marking and the unfair weighting given to communication task.

This charming Christian lady informed me that the percentage scores for mathe-matics, language arts, science and social studies, as presented to the general public, are useless in determining the student's placement in a high school or the award of a scholarship.

And the reason percentages are given is because that is what parents can understand. And if parents, who are products of the education system, can only understand the measure of how well a child has done in terms of percentages, then that would be an indictment on the education system.

Notwithstanding, according to the ministry, the way to really calculate the performance of a child and that which determines the placement of a child in a high school and the award of a scholarship is to look at the standard scores derived from statistically massaging the students' raw scores with the mean score and the standard deviation for each subject.

No change in scores

If what the ministry official said was true, then it is clear that the Ministry of Education has a Gestapo-type marking system which is a secret and only a chosen few know it.

Also, it would be a scandal for the ministry to be issuing percentage scores which are useless in determining one's placement and award of a scholarship.

However, I do not think that the ministry official is correct. I checked with a statistician and, just as I suspected, whether you use raw scores or percentages, the result will be the same. In other words, the top performer will not change whether the raw score is used and then a bell curve or a percentage.

So, it does not matter whether the Ministry of Education uses standard scores or percentages, it should not affect who is classified as the top performer.

However, what we are having is confusion. The confusion gets worse when in The Sunday Gleaner (July 6) an advertisement placed by the Mt Alvernia Preparatory School, St James, states that Win Phyo (WP) was the top performer islandwide with a 98 per cent average. The school is challenging that James Robertson (JR) is the top performer.

The school can make that claim because of the weight given to communication task (see table).

Use percentage scores

It is immaterial whether for each correct answer for science, the child gets 1.5 per cent, while, for social studies, each correct answer carries one per cent because at the end, it is out of 100 per cent. The problem has nothing to do with raw scores or bell curve.

At university, one can get the same number of credits for two different subjects and it does not mean the degree of difficulty is the same in the two subjects.

At high school, to determine the overall average and position in the class, all the percentage scores are used. So, what's up with the GSAT scoring system?

The solution is simple. Continue to use the percentage scores and make communication a pass or fail subject.

Rev Devon Dick is pastor of Boulevard Baptist Church and author of 'Rebellion to Riot: the Church in Nation Building'. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.