Cabinet has decided to award scholarships to 400 students who wrote the recent Caribbean Education Secondary Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exam (CAPE).
But principals across T&T, who have been identifying their top performing students and assessing how many scholarships their schools may get, will have some more waiting to do.
The Education Ministry has not yet received the list of scholarship winners from CAPE and CSEC, Education Minister Anthony Garcia said at yesterday’s post-Cabinet media briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister, St Clair.
However, once the ministry gets the lists, its Scholarships Selection Committee would be hard at work, he assured.
Giving a breakdown of the results, the minister said in the CSEC 58.1 per cent of the Form Five students who wrote the examination got full certificates or five and more passes. He said while students performed creditably well in subject areas like physical education and sport, religious education and economics, the ministry remained concerned about performances in mathematics and English A.
Some 54.1 per cent of the CSEC students passed mathematics in 2016, a slight decline from the 61.1 per cent who passed in 2015. Of those who wrote English A, 72 per cent passed, an increase from the 64.6 per cent in 2016.
In Unit One of the CAPE, written by Lower Six students, 94.6 per cent of those who wrote the exam achieved a passing grade. In Unit Two, written by Upper Six students, 94.1 per cent passed.
Garcia said the results showed a slight improvement from 2015. He said last year almost the same number of students achieved passing grades in the examinations.
Asked how many students got no passes, Garcia said his ministry was still tabulating the figures but said nine per cent got below the lowest passing grade of five in CAPE.
He said “30-something” per cent of those who wrote the CSEC got grades below the lowest passing grade of three.
Garcia said the ministry had put strategies in place to deal with its concerns over the performance of students, particularly in the areas of English A and mathematics.
Many students did not read and the ministry wanted to encourage children to get into critical thinking, he said. He suggested poetry as a good start. Children are also grappling with understanding concepts.
“There concerns with algebra. When they don’t get a hold on algebra, it militates against them getting good grades,” he said.
Curriculum officers, ably assisted by school supervisors, have been mandated to go to the schools and meet principals and head of departments to make sure what was on the syllabus was being taught and being done in a timely manner, Garcia said.