SBAs should be abolished
Dear Editor, I refer to the letter titled, ‘A three months attachment to a workplace should replace SBAs for CXC students’ (SN, September 24). I now share some thoughts on the educational soap opera called SBAs.
I agree with my friend, Mr Tajnauth Jadunauth, that a workplace internship offers more exposure and benefit than this phenomenon called SBAs. I, however, would take things further and recommend that these exercises, to a large extent, in futility and trickery, be eliminated altogether. What may have started out as an independent research oriented project has mutated into an outright farce.
Too many times, I have scrutinized SBA submissions that had no relationship with their supposed authors; could not have had. Here it was that students who struggle with a five word sentence, overnight delivering SBAs in perfect English, with impressive citations, along with content of substance and reach. Further, there were students who could not write twenty-five words on any topic to save their lives, now handing over twenty-five hundred word dissertations. Students (the great majority in this country) who do not read period, who have no frame of reference, who cannot manage a conversation on anything, tendering finished SBA products that would make gifted students proud. Well, well, like I said: a farce, if not a full-fledged fraud.
In addition, the suspicion is that the questionnaires and surveys never left the drawing board and the house. To be clear, this means that there is doubt over the authenticity of the analyses and statistics and conclusions submitted. Thus the system is gamed. It is gamed when SBAs from earlier years are recycled with a few amendments here and there; it is gamed when education professionals sell services and finished products; it is gamed when almost everything about what is furnished with a straight face is not of the student’s
initiative or effort. All that is missing is the wink and nod.
It is a public secret that, in many instances, these research projects at the CXC level are based more on fiction than on fact. They lack viability and utility in terms of what is gained by the students; and students lose credibility when and where such counts, and for those looking for such things. Yet the charade and trickery is allowed to continue year after year and inculcate in young minds that corners can be cut, and academic sleight-ofhand can occur unchallenged, if not successfully.
Separately, and from the essence of Mr Jadunauth’s penultimate paragraph, I should point out that no one is forcing parents to fund their offspring’s reading for an enormous number of subjects at CXC. Rather, it is many of the parents themselves who insist upon such senseless and pointless numbers. It feeds the ego, makes for good cocktail conversation, establishes family and neighbourhood bragging rights, and creates attention for publicity seeking parents. Now what is happy hour for parents is not a necessarily sober standard for students. But nobody is forcing parents, other than for the occasional empty-headed head teacher seeking to outshine and one-up the competition.
These are among the reasons why this society has some wellcredentialled (numbers) CXC students, who would have difficulty disclosing where parliament building is located. Yours faithfully, GHK Lall