GEORGETOWN, Guyana– Guyana has emerged at the top of this year’s Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE), Director of Operations at the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), Dr. Nicole Manning announced Thursday.
The examination body announced the 2021 CAPE and Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) results at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre.
“Overall, Guyana’s (CAPE) performance was marginally higher compared to the rest of the region,” Dr. Manning said. “We had 16 units of which 100 percent candidates received Grades One to Five.”
Grades One to Five is considered passes in CAPE, while in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, Grades One to Three is considered passes.
Guyana also received high pass rates in the latter exams. Dr. Manning indicated that 70 percent of students were able to attain Grades One to Three passes.
For 2021, there were two sittings of examinations – June/July for the region and a separate sitting for St. Vincent and the Grenadines cohort due to the unexpected eruption of the La Soufrière volcano on the island.
As some of the measures aimed at reducing the pressure on students, Dr. Manning indicated a reduction in School-Based Assessments (SBAs) requirements by as much as 50 percent in some instances. CXC had also reduced the requirements for specific subjects given COVID-19 restrictions such as oral examinations.
“For the first time, we would have introduced a facility known as deferral who might have felt as if they were not ready to sit exams in 2021, and they had the opportunity to defer all or some of the subjects. We had also given them an opportunity, also for the first time, for students to deter submitting their SBAs until 2022,” Dr. Manning articulated.
Meanwhile, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand congratulated the students for their remarkable achievements, despite the unprecedented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If we are honest, and we should be, the pandemic caught us at widely different levels of readiness for the unprecedented demands and new modes o education of delivery. Equally notable is the fact that our systems responded to the disruptions with varying degrees of alacrity,” she said.
In the future, the Education Minister pointed out that the region must examine strategies to advance education and pay equal attention to address systemic barriers that hinder participation and benefiting in this critical sector.
“To all the students in Guyana and the region, I commend your reliance and efforts in the face of such daunting challenges over the past year and a half. You should be extremely proud of yourself and should use this experience to propel you into even greater achievements in the future,” she said.
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