Jamaica teachers say CXC papers not being marked properly; hit out at new electronic system
(Jamaica Observer) The integrity of the region’s secondary examination has been brought into question as some educators are uncomfortable with the recently implemented electronic marking system.
The high school teachers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the value of grades issued by the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) has degraded since the system’s implementation.
“The major concern is the results, what we are expecting as teachers, we are not getting,” one teacher, who heads the English Department at a Corporate Area school, said.
The CXC syllabus covers two years — grades 10 and 11 — and it is within this period of teaching and assessing that teachers are able to pinpoint whether a child is likely to pass, and with what grade.
According to the CXC website, candidates are awarded grades between one and six, with a grade one representing an “outstanding performance” and grade six, a representation of “a very limited standard of performance”. “I am a teacher of English and there are some children in my class who I know can’t write a sentence and they go up and they get a [grade] one,” she said while noting acceptance that teachers aren’t always correct.
The department head related that the school’s equivalent in the Modern Languages Department also expressed concern about the performance of two students — one expected to do extremely well and another who consistently performed below average and was not expected to pass. When the results were published the usually poorperforming student was awarded a grade one, while the high achiever got a lower grade.
“It jumps out because this is the complaint all around and it’s not just this one case,” the teacher stated.
“We feel that the papers are not being marked properly because we are the ones who teach the students. We know what they are capable of, and students who are getting grades one and two we know — based on what we have seen with them for the last two years — that there is no way that they can get that grade,” an English instructor at the Corporate Area school added.
“A student at our school who can barely read got a grade two in English Language,” another English teacher from a rural high school told the Jamaica Observer. “Even students who failed the City & Guilds exam were passing CXC English.
“How can that happen?” he questioned. “The City & Guilds exam is usually for the slow students.”
The UK-based examination is dedicated to vocational studies and is aimed at recognising different types of learners. It provides certification for students who need an option as opposed to the CSEC exam.
Assistant Registrar, Public Information and Customer Services at the CXC Cleveland Sam, in a written response to the Sunday Observer noted that while there is no general pattern, candidates sometimes “exceed their teachers’ expectations” while others do not do as well as projected.
E-marking, which was first employed in 2013, facilitates the marking of scripts in an online environment rather than a physical location.
In its first year, there was over 90 per cent correlation between scripts marked electronically and manually, when compared.
The assistant registrar, in explaining the system’s stages, said the scripts are first scanned and separated by questions, then individual questions are assigned to markers. The scripts are then marked using random seeding to uphold quality standards, and finally samples of scripts at grade boundaries are reviewed to ensure cut scores are maintained each year.