Few weeks ago, the API summarised and published a report from the education department with what it says was the “highest CXC/CSEC passes ever”, and it listed the percentage at 79.11% pass rate for 2025. Mind you, a press release published by the government on the same results has year 2021 listed with a pass rate of 83.48%. One may find it difficult to digest how 79 is higher than 83.
Of the top five performing schools, Girls’ High School is listed as “first” with an overall pass rate of 98.92% and 5th place Canouan Secondary, with 85.25%.
How is the pass rate calculated and what exactly does the number mean, in the context of the Vincentian reality?
The press release on the results, dated Aug. 28, 2025, has this: “This year, 2212 candidates were registered. Of these, 1570 were school candidates and 642 were private candidates.”
The same release goes on to say: “There were 1557 school candidates from 28 secondary schools sitting papers 1 and II with 10440 subject entries in 31 subject areas. Approximately, 79.11% of the subject entries were awarded Grades I-III.”
There are a few questions that come to mind right away:
- How is the 1,570 school candidates differ from the 1,557 (from 28 secondary schools)? Is it that the difference of 13 were school candidates who were not specifically from secondary schools?
- Are we only measuring the pass rate for those entries from the 28 secondary schools?
Be that as it may, let’s see if we can untie what this 79.11% pass rate really means.
Based on the release, it appears as though pass rate is a factor of how many of the subject entries gained a grade of 1, 2, or 3.
In other words, if there were three students who wrote 15 subjects altogether, and there were eight passes altogether, the pass rate would be 53% (8/15).
This could be in any combination. It could be that one student wrote 10, another wrote 3, and another one wrote 2. That’s 15 entries total. In this example, 53% pass rate could be because of the one student who wrote and passed eight out of his/her 10, which would mean that 53% pass rate is because of one student passing 8 subjects. This would also mean that the other two students didn’t pass any subjects at all.
Similarly, if one student in the entire country wrote one subject and passed, we would have a 100% pass rate. Effectively, we should dissect the numbers to see exactly what they mean to our reality. How have individual students performed? How have other schools performed, particularly those that are rural?
Also, for this year –2025 — how come physical education and sport, and theatre arts were the top two performing subject areas, while mathematics and technical drawing were the two worst? What is this telling us?
Following the government’s own historical numbers, Union Island Secondary had a pass rate of 44.81% in 2023. How did it go from 80% in 2010, to 44.81% in 2023? Similarly for Petit Bordel Secondary, how did it go from 80% CSEC pass rate in 2010 to 54.58% in 2023? How is it that George Stephens Secondary has only gotten above 60% one time since 2011? Was it natural disaster or was it the impact of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate why several of these schools had CSEC pass rates in the 30s in 2022, or was it something else? West St. George Secondary, 31.28% in 2022; Sandy Bay Secondary, 31.07%; Troumaca Secondary, 34.62%.
Moreover, why is it that in 2022-2023 year, only 56.07% of males were surviving to form 5? What does this mean, and where are these young males?
Whenever we see the numbers for educational performance being presented, perhaps it would serve us best to dig below the surface to truly understand the representation and true meaning of the numbers in the context of our reality.
Observer
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