Covid19 'pushes' CXC, CAPE exams to July

The Caribbean Examinations Council has announced 2020 CXC and CAPE examinations may take place in July, instead of May/June.
Although the proposed revised administration schedule is July, the council on Thursday said it would be guided by national protocols across the region.

CXC registrar and CEO Dr Wayne Wesley, in an online briefing out of Barbados, said the modified process will be carried out by using the results of the multiple-choice assessment and the moderated school-based assessment (SBA), or the Paper 03 (2), which is the alternative to SBA for private candidates, to award final grades.

He said there are certain subjects where candidates will be required to complete additional components. These are modern languages, Spanish, French and Portuguese, as well as Visual Arts and Human and Social Biology (HSB). For Visual Arts, candidates will have to submit the personal journal they would have been keeping throughout the year, while for modern languages there are oral and profile assessments which must be carried out in order to get the complete profiling of those subjects. For HSB, Paper 2 will have to be administered as there is no SBA for that subject.

CXC manager, examinations administration and security, Diane Medford said marking of the multiple-choice paper was automatic and this, along with the SBAs, would reduce the need for marking on-site in Barbados by a large number of people, as is the norm. She said the deadlines for SBAs and oral examinations would be pushed back by a month. With respect to SBAs that needed to be carried out in a laboratory, Medford said the arrangements would be made in conjunction with the local registrars of each country where necessary.
She said there are 30,016 candidates sitting the CAPE examination and 20,318 candidates sitting CXC, with another 15,000 candidates doing additional examinations.

Wesley said this strategy will employ the e-testing modality, either online and offline, in order to reduce the administration processing time, resulting in the shortest turnaround for the marking and release of examination results. In addition, it will provide an opportunity for timely presentation of grades to facilitate matriculation to higher education and to access employment, and also minimise disruption to the 2020/2021 academic year. He said the hope was to have results ready by August to early September.

Wesley said these measures are being put in place in the event that the covid19 pandemic had run its course, but the situation would be monitored to determine if the examinations would be moved further down in the year, or if they would be cancelled as a last resort.
He said students and teachers are encouraged to utilise the CXC Learning Hub, the e-Learning platform that provides learners and instructors with a single access point to multiple resources geared towards exam preparation at learninghub.cxc.org.