No data on Jamaica’s SBA delinquency

The Overseas Examinations Commission (OEC) is yet to determine the number of Jamaican students who were delinquent in submitting their School-Based Assessments (SBAs) in the recent May-June sitting.

The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) reported on Monday that more than 11 per cent of candidates across the region did not submit their SBAs.

Some 25,967 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) students and 4,838 others who sat the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination failed to hand in the mandatory component to their teachers.

OEC Deputy Director Sharon Burnett said candidates may have deferred subjects and there are others whose SBAs might not have been acknowledged at the time of marking.

There were deferrals of 1,155 entries across the 34 subject areas.

Students had the opportunity to defer exams up to 24 hours before the sitting.

“We’ve had an extended period of queries because sometimes there are challenges with the uploads, and so when the SBAs are uploaded, there may be issues – it’s not a complete upload, and so it is marked as missing,” Burnett said.

“And so even though the schools would report that they have a confirmation email to say that all has been uploaded, in fact, CXC may not have received them.”

Burnett added that CXC is allowing schools to resubmit SBAs and she anticipates that the initial figure reported by the examination body on Monday will be revised downwards.

Last year, 5.04 per cent of CAPE students were among the delinquent group. In the recent sitting, the figure was 5.02 per cent.

For CSEC, there were 31,270 delinquent candidates in 2021 compared to 25,967 in 2022.

CXC Director of Operations Dr Nicole Manning had said that even though there was reduction, the issue remains a cause for concern because it is far more than what was recorded in previous years.