The Ministry of Education says the term missing music scores does not mean that data has been lost, but that it is being tracked or validated.
This is in response to the Sunday Guardian's story on the lost Continuous Assessment Component (CAC) music scores and the mix-up of other subjects of the Secondary Entrance Assessment Examination (SEA) titled “Ministry loses CAC music scores.”
In a release from the ministry on Monday, it said, “Upon investigation, the Ministry of Education has found that claims made in a newspaper article entitled ‘Ministry loses CAC music scores’ are not true.
“It was reported that students’ scores were lost, ‘mixed up’ or ‘cannot be located’ thereby compromising the integrity of the 2016 Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examinations.”
In the newspaper article TTUTA (T&T Unified Teachers' Association) president Devanand Sinanan said there were many irregularities associated with the CAC and called on the Ministry of Education to put an immediate halt to the CAC at the Standard Four level.
In addition, the article claimed that the scores for all the other CAC subjects (Agricultural Science, PE, Science, Character and Citizenship Education, Drama, Creative Writing and Art) have been “mixed up” by the IT department of the Ministry of Education by allocating incorrect marks to students, thereby compromising the integrity of the 2016 SEA exam.
A statement issued by Sinanan yesterday said principals have been instructed to resubmit marks for those components, including Visual Arts, Character and Citizenship Education and English Language Arts, without any explanation. He described the situation as “gross inefficiency” by the ministry.
He reiterated a call for the CAC to be halted in Standard Four until a proper review of the programme was done.
After Education Minister Anthony Garcia was apprised of the situation on Sunday, he promised to have the matter investigated. “The Ministry states that the allegations, specific to the music part of the CAC, are not accurate as these assessments were fully implemented during the period January 16 to July 1, 2015, and music scores have in fact been uploaded since the last academic year and can be viewed by schools that have access to the online platform.”
It added any requests for music scores at this time were made to ensure that they were included in moderation packages so that the staff of schools who were proceeding on Easter vacation would not have to be contacted during the vacation to provide “missing scores.”
The release said the term “missing scores” was coined by officials of the ministry to refer to scenarios where scores have not been uploaded for the following reasons:
1. Scores were not uploaded before the deadline (an assessment schedule is circulated to all primary schools at the beginning of the academic year).
2. Irregularities due to non-compliance with the guidelines (specified during face-to-face training and in the manual). These can include loss of data because the session “timed out” during upload; not saving the data; not sending the file to the Ministry of Education.
3. Students were absent, dropped out, withdrew from the class, transferred from one institution to another, are repeating Standard Four or re-sitting Standard Five. A tracking process is subsequently implemented to verify whether the student participated in the assessment to explain the “missing score.”
It said the term “missing scores” does not mean data was lost, but was being tracked or validated.
The release stated additionally, it was pertinent to note that no scores that had been uploaded by schools were in any way “mixed up.” It explained, firstly, the online platform was designed so that each school was assigned a centre code for which there were two levels of clearance—the administrator and the user.
It said no other personnel apart from the designated officers or personnel from the Information and Communication Technology Division can interface with the data.
The release went on, secondly, the structure within which the data was organised had specific fields that clearly indicated what data was to be uploaded and reports can be generated for verification with the master sheets that were provided.
It said the online platform was developed and managed by the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) as part of its assessment services to T&T.
The release said data capture and processing for CAC used a platform similar to that developed for CSEC and CAPE level examinations.
It said as part of the quality assurance process for the SEA, the ministry had requested that principals check all instances of missing scores for students identified on the online registration system. Further, principals had been requested to ensure that samples of students' work were submitted for moderation by CXC.