Why NCSE? (part 1)

TTUTA writes a weekly column for the Newsday.

The National Certificate of Secondary Education (NCSE) Level 1 is an examination that all students in Form 3 must sit. It is supposedly a national test of sorts, but given the current economic crunch the country is experiencing, it might be an opportune time to examine its purpose and relevance.

The NCSE had its genesis in the Secondary Education Modernisation Programme (SEMP) which was the brainchild of the Basdeo Panday administration between 1995-2000. One of its four pillars was the reform of the secondary curriculum and this was conceived as the NCSE.

Level I was administered at the end of year three and Level II at the end of year five of secondary schooling. The curriculum centred around eight core subjects up to Form 3 and all schools were mandated to pursue this curriculum.

With this curriculum came subjects such as technology education, for example. Teachers were coerced into teaching a subject that basically focused on application rather than content. Large sums of money were spent on foreign consultants to train teachers to teach this new subject up to Form 3.

Technology laboratories were supposed to be established in all secondary schools to facilitate the delivery of this curriculum, but this never materialised.

Job descriptions were never developed for teachers to teach this subject and there was no defined curriculum. The result was and continues to be confusion about the relevance of this subject.

Many high-achieving schools ignored the directive to stick to eight core subjects at the lower levels. Level II never materialised to replace the CSEC. The consultants offered dubious training for teachers and left with enhanced pockets. Till today the NCSE Level I exam persists, despite SEMP being discarded by the Patrick Manning administration that followed.

If the examination is supposed to be a national test of sorts — a snapshot at a point in time — whereby the curriculum planners use its results to gauge how effective the curriculum is being delivered and how and where it should be altered, that’s fine.

However, the reality seems to indicate that this is not the case, since curriculum changes are significantly influenced by CXC. Moreover the results of the NCSE are released in mid-October so schools cannot even use the results as a basis to inform practice or place the students in subject groupings in Form 4.

Why then is the ministry persisting with this examination? Many schools offer more than the eight core subjects at the lower forms based on their programme of preparation for the CSEC. The NCSE certificates given to the students hold little currency and students don’t even bother to collect them because all are focused on preparation for CSEC.

Schools have to also forgo their internal examinations at the end of Form 3 to facilitate the NCSE exams and have to devise other means of assessments to be able to place students in Form 4.

The NCSE is a relic of the SEMP initiative that continues to be an unnecessary cost to taxpayers. One will be curious to know what use the ministry puts to the results of the NCSE as part of the national education planning process. While detailed analysis of the examination results are eventually sent to schools, the time lag between the exam and the receipt of these results make these analyses almost useless.

Given the high-stakes nature of the CSEC, the NCSE was bound to become irrelevant. One may also question the need to have a national examination at the Form 3 level, given the high prominence of the CSEC at the end of Form 5.

This is only the tip of this iceberg. Next week we will explore this issue further.