Stress to get SEA results as thousands log in on portal

SCORES of anxious parents and their children waited in long “virtual lines” on Monday, some for hours, as they tried to log into the Education Ministry’s online portal in order to get the children’s Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) results.

The results were released online at midday, but many faced issues logging into the ministry website.

Though there were no crowds at the primary schools in Port of Spain which Newsday visited, teachers and some parents vented their frustrations over the problems accessing the SEA results online portal.

At around 12.50 pm, the mother of a Sacred Heart Boys’ RC School student said that at that time, she was still unable to log-in.

The frustration was also evident at Richmond Street Boys’ Anglican school, where only two of the 42 SEA students had gotten their results well after 1 pm.

Keisha Toussaint, the mother of Keshen Toussaint, 11, and Aeshalaun Toussaint, 13, said she even asked her son to check on his cellphone to see if he could access the portal for the results. When this failed, she later begged a teacher to see if she could access the results on a computer in the school.

Catholic Education Board of Management CEO Sharon Mangroo said that before Monday, there was apprehension that the portal would crash. Another area of concern was those parents without an internet connection.

“We expected children would have gone to the schools, but there is not a large turnout either because no such instruction was given,” she said. Mangroo later congratulated all SEA students.

Acting Secretary General of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha Vijay Maharaj said out of the more than 18,000 children who sat the exam, “No more than 35-40 per cent have access to online facilities, so therefore the rest would have to depend on schools getting the results, printing it and giving it to them.”

Maharaj added that he does not regard this method as a better alternative to the physical handing-over of results, but conceded that if the country wants to digitalise, this is the only way going forward.

He said the majority of his primary schools got the results at about 3 pm.

“There was a hitch in the system. But I think what was not taken into consideration was that you had a parent at home trying to log-on for one child and you had another working in Port of Spain trying to get the same results. “So even though over 18,000 children wrote the exam, there might have been at least 30,000 people trying to log on to the system.”

He said a lot of people called him to ask about the delay and he tried to liaise with the ministry to get some insight into what was happening.

Parent Karen Solomon shared her experiences using the portal to try to get the results of her daughter Vyka Mahabal’s exam performance.

“When we tried to log-on, we did not get in immediately. It was a process of going back in constantly.

But that was not a problem for us because we wanted to keep it the old-fashioned way. We went to the school, we allowed our daughter to go into the school and for the principal to give her the results.”

Solomon said her daughter, who attended the Gandhi Memorial Vedic School in Barataria, passed for her first choice – St Augustine Girls’ High School (SAGHS).

Vyka, 12, thanked both of her parents – father Vyas Mahabal who is a traffic clerk at Newsday, and mother Karen Solomon – for helping her study and for ensuring she did all of her practise papers in the run-up to the exams.

The youngster said that some of her school friends were very stressed out on Monday given the delays and their inability to get into the SEA results portal.

But in the end, by Monday evening, all of her friends had finally got their results.