5,000 Jamaicans get no CSEC passes
Published:Wednesday | December 15, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter
Almost 5,000 Jamaica public secondary-school students who sat the 2010 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations ended up without a single pass.
However, this represents a continuing reduction in the number of students failing to pass even one subject.
For the 2010 examinations, 14.2 per cent of the 33,888 students who faced the examiners for the year failed every subject they sat.
But local educators can take some comfort in the constant trend which started after 2007, when just over 7,200, or 23 per cent, of the students finished without a pass.
Last year, 5,261 students, or 16.2 per cent of those who sat CSEC subjects, failed to achieve a passing grade.
The numbers are contained in a document prepared by the Programme, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of the education ministry, based on preliminary data from the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC).
The data show that approximately 47 per cent of public secondary-school students obtained passes in one to four subjects - a slight decrease of one per cent over 2009.
The major good news in the data is that slightly less than 33 per cent of the Jamaican candidates passed five to eight subjects, a performance similar to last year's.
In addition, almost four per cent of Jamaican public-school students who sat the examinations attained passes in nine or more subjects.
There was one student who passed 13 subjects, surpassing Jamaica's record for the most passes in one CSEC sitting, which was 12, achieved in 2008 and 2009.
Girls outshine boys
The trend of female students outperforming males continued in most subject areas this year.
The girls accounted for 61 per cent of the subject entries from public secondary schools this year, outdoing the boys almost two to one.
They also outdistanced the boys when the students achieving grades one and two were compared.
However, the sexes found some parity when those getting grade three were compared. Approximately 30 per cent of the boys and girls achieved this mark.
Boys also had a higher failure rate in all subjects.
Just over 17,400 girls passed at least one subject, representing 89 per cent of those who sat the examinations.
However, only 81 per cent of the boys reached a pass mark in at least one subject.
The gap widens when the comparison is made between the boys and girls passing five or more subjects, including English and mathematics.
Girls account for 65 per cent of the 7,330 students who passed five or more subjects, including the two key subjects needed to enter most universities.