My fix for GSAT placement woes

Damion Crawford, Guest Columnist

In a Gleaner article titled 'Campion, Jago in high demand' and dated June 22, 2011, Minister of Education Andrew Holness was quoted as saying, "Every year at GSAT time, (there is) weeping and wailing as students can't get into the school of choice. For one school, for every place that is there, seven persons applied for it, and at another school, after putting up 400 spaces, it was zero applications for that space. This minister will not allow that to continue."

To this point, I have not heard of a plan to reverse a situation which has led to the article reporting that only 50 of the 167 schools were considered schools of choice. The above information confirms that, as a society, we perceive many of our institution as 'schools of doom'. In fact, the 2010 data show that:

1. The top-five schools, as judged by student preference, have 1,300 places; 9,000 students selected these schools as their first choice.

2. The top-10 schools, judged by student preferences had a total 2,565 places; 14,000 students selected them as first choice.

3. The top-20 schools, judged by student preferences had a total of 4,720 places; 24,239 selected these schools as first choices.

4. In 2011, Campion College, which has 210 places, had 1,635 students selecting the school as their first choice. That suggests that only one in every eight students would be successful in 'passing' for Campion.

The above reality has caused for high emotion among parents and students whose children/wards fail to get into schools of their choices. In fact, in 2010, The Gleaner reported that parents lamented that students with grades as high as 80 per cent did not get into schools of their choice. It is also not unusual to see 12-year-olds in tears from the disappointment of not getting into their schools of choice.

Placement method

The Ministry of Education states the placement method as such: "The GSAT placement is about 95 per cent automatic. It starts with the computer ranking all students, with the child getting the highest score being ranked one, down to the child with the lowest score. The child ranked one is placed in his first-choice school, followed by the one ranked two, and so on. This continues until all the places in a school for a gender are filled.

When the computer comes to placing another child on the list whose first-choice school is already full, it searches the child's second-choice school for a place that matches the gender. If the place is available, the child is placed in that school. If the place is not available, it searches the third-choice school for a place; if there is no place, it searches the fourth and the fifth choices.

If there is no place in any of the five schools chosen by a child, the computer searches through the ministry's proximity list for a school with a place that matches that child's gender.

There is a small number of children whose scores are very low who are manually placed. These children are placed blindly with only an identification number, and their sending schools known to the education officers from the different regions who place the children. They are placed in schools which have available places and which can cater to their needs.

Selection practice

It is the practice of students and parents to select only traditional, and in many cases, 'brand-name', schools. To this extent, it is not abnormal for a student to select five schools that attract students with the same average.

For example, if a student selects Kingston College, Jamaica College, St George's College, Campion and Wolmer's as his five choices, and the students who get into these schools gained an average of 90-100 per cent across the board, if the above student that selected these schools as his five choices got an average of 88 per cent, he COULD end up at a school that is closest to his home or ALL-AGE SCHOOL, which may be a school that has an average of 35 per cent. One can, therefore, understand the anxiety by the parent and more so the student who now feels as if he is a failure.

We cannot continue to subject our children to this.

Proposed solution

While the long-term solutions exist in the improvement of all schools to a minimum standard and the establishment of a minimum infrastructural blessing that includes an equipped science lab, computer lab, study area, library, playing field and canteen, there is need for a short-term solution which I suggest exists in a model I term the Realistic Objective School Selection Scenarios (ROSSS).

What is ROSSS?

We have five years of data from GSAT students that can be used to create a forecasting model to predict a student's GSAT exam performance by using the student's current performance.

Step 1: Schools are divided into 10 tiers using a variation of the 'US News College Ranking' system which is a rated average of:

1. CXC passes

2. Graduation rate

3. High-school principals' rating

4. Academic reputation

5. Student retention

6. Faculty resources

7. Student selectivity

8. Financial resources

9. Strength of alumni

Step 2: An Excel document has been designed for parents/teachers to enter the student's term grades from as early as fourth grade. Once the student's grades are entered, the likely tier will automatically be calculated: for example, Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three, etc.

Step 3: Parents/teachers will then select schools based on tier prediction as follows:

Choices one and two: best-case scenario - that is, students choose their preferred schools.

Choices three and four: most likely case scenario - that is, students choose two schools from within the tier that is prescribed by ROSSS.

Choice five: worst-case scenario - that is, students choose one school from a tier below that which is prescribed by ROSSS.

Some features of ROSSS:

1. ROSSS will help parents and students analyse their likely performance from as early as fourth grade, which can inform them of how much more effort needs to be placed if they want to be in a particular tier.

2. ROSSS attaches a weighting to term performance with an increased weighting for the later grades. Therefore, sixth-grade performance is weighted higher than fifth-grade performance, and fifth-grade performance is weighted higher than fourth-grade performance.

3. ROSSS also uses mock-exam results to calculate exam-pressure weighting, hence capturing how the pressure of exams positively or negatively affects the student.

Conclusion

I believe that this forecasting model can help to solve some of the problems we are currently facing with the GSAT placement system. I, therefore, beseech the ministry to allow access to the information that exists of the ministry to create a statistically significant predictive system.

Further, with the assistance of the minister, we could also make a more robust predictive model using a multiplicity of variables.

ROSSS will be provided free of charge to schools and parents that want to have access to this model. It is also colour-coded and labelled for ease of use.

Damion Crawford is a former PNPYO president and is expected to run for Parliament in the next general election. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.