Students breathe a sigh of relief after CXC exams postponement

The Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) has announced that this year’s CSEC and CAPE examinations will be postponed by three weeks. The exams which were scheduled to begin on 2 May will now start on 23 May. An additional two weeks have also been given for the submission of School Based Assessments (SBA) for all CSEC and CAPE Examinations. Due to the later start of exams, students will receive their results in late August to early September. This is still earlier than last year when students received their results in October.

Since early January, Jamaica’s education ministry has been appealing to CXC for a postponement. The Caribbean Examination Council made this decision to give students more time to prepare in light of the impact of COVID-19. In a recent survey conducted by the ministry in February and March about exam readiness, 62 per cent of the students surveyed said they were not ready for their exams and needed more time to prepare.

The Monitor spoke with students who will be sitting their CSEC Examinations, and they expressed their gratefulness for the extension. “I feel extremely relieved because I was not ready to write the exams despite the extra classes and extra studying”, one student said. One collective issue that all students said they were facing was the incompletion of their syllabuses. One student said, “[For] six out of the eight subjects I’m doing, [their] syllabuses are not finished and so it gives us more time to complete them.”

Students were also concerned about not having adequate time to catch up on their studies since the resumption of face-to-face classes after falling behind in online school. One student said face- to-face classes have not made much difference to performance because of all the other demands of school. “I had to prepare for Mock exams, I was still getting homework and projects, while completing SBAs and trying to study all the same time,” she explained.