Who is moderating CXC

THE EDITOR: In light of the release of the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) findings from the review team presented on Sunday, chaired by Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, there were many questions but little answers, specifically surrounding the School-Based Assessments (SBA) and Internal Assessments (IA) moderation process. Therefore I share several of the questions I believe should be answered in more detail.

During the media conference on Sunday it was stated that all SBAs were 100 per cent moderated. This differs from CXC’s original moderation process where five SBAs per subject, per school were submitted for remarking. Therefore, regardless if your class was 20 or 100 for that particular subject, CXC would need to remark five SBAs in total for that school for that subject.

If CXC did remark every candidate's SBA, one major hurdle can be seen is logistics. With 40, 000 students writing CAPE exams regionally and 120,000 CSEC students this year, you can see how daunting this task becomes to remark every SBA.

The question that needs to be answered is: was CXC well equipped to undertake this process for all students in all subjects, in an equitable manner, maintaining quality assurance and quality control as was promised by council? Given that the quantity of SBAs were numerous and the time allotted to mark shorter, how did CXC close this gap?

One of the possibilities would have been hiring new markers. These markers would have to be experienced in their respective subject and extensively trained for the moderation procedure. However, CXC did not make an official call for more moderators this year, leading to the question: who corrected the many SBAs and did they have sufficient training and time for the task to be done properly?

Further in the press conference Wayne Wesley, the CXC registrar, stated that there was a low correlation between the teacher’s grade and the moderator’s grade, with 66 per cent of all SBAs showing disagreement in marking compared to 63 per cent in 2019, which reveals that there is a trend in differences in marking from year to year. However, the massive region-wide discrepancies which have never been seen in the 48 years of CXC’s history puts this statement into question.

There are teachers and principals from across the region who have stated that many of their top students, some of whom topped the region in their unit 1 CAPE examinations, are being awarded grades that are not in keeping with their performance. The answer offered by Prof Beckles was that expectations of students need to be managed as the grades given by teachers are not final and CXC has the final say in the grading process.

However, some of these students have already submitted SBAs for unit 1 and many of these teachers have been submitting SBA grades for many years with satisfactory feedback and no changes to their original marks. So why is there the sudden change now?

The modified approach not only brings a significant number of SBAs to be marked but also a significant oversight apparatus is needed. In an April 29 interview, Wesley stated that the moderation exercise will be done with “the continued rigour of our quality assurance mechanisms.” What are these quality assurance mechanisms? We have been asked many times by CXC to trust the process but in order to do so transparency must come first.

The final questions I pose are whether there was proper oversight to ensure that grades were accurately awarded to deserving candidates. And in the case of the modified approach, who was moderating the moderators?

REISHARD RAMSUBHAG

via e-mail