KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, March 15, IWN — Parents should be more concerned about the Common Entrance Examination (CEE) than the test that will replace it, a Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) official says.
The CXC’s Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment (CPEA) is replacing the CEE across the region.
CXC says the CPEA will ensure that students have the skills needed to succeed at secondary school.
“Parent[s], think about it this way: what you should be worried about is the old Common Entrance Exam because that was a do or die exam and the pressure was first of all felt by you parents, who then passed on the tension to your children,” Dr. Didacus Jules, registrar of CXC said on radio on Wednesday.
“The assurance that we can give you, and I am giving you that unequivocally here tonight, and I am not pulling promises out of my head, … is that your child will be far better off under that new methodology than under that old system,” Jules further said.
He said the internal assessment, which will be done during ahead of the exam, “is a very painstaking process, where your child will have to do things, get feedback, go back and improve on what they have done, based on the feedback.
“… It is what we call an iterative process. So, it is not a one shot, do or die anything. The child will be given adequate opportunity, at least two years [to prepare],” he said.
“This is not a cramming thing. You cannot cram for the CPEA because we are not going to ask you about the structure of the eye or throw some googly question at you. What we are testing for are the skills and the competencies that you require –how you think, how you reason, how you present,” Jules further said.