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Owen Speid, Principal of Rousseau Primary School and Winnie Berry, Chief Executive Officer (acting) in the Ministry of Education
There is more concern about the format for the assessment and presentation of students' performance from the first sitting of the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations.
Owen Speid, Principal of Rousseau Primary School, has expressed surprise at the announcement regarding how the results will be presented.
He indicated that he learnt about the format in the public domain and not from formal communication channels within the Ministry of Education.
The issue has arisen a week before the release of the PEP results, and days after a news conference hosted by Karl Samuda, who is overseeing the Education Ministry.
Mr. Samuda and ministry officials sought to explain that students will be provided with a detailed report on their performance with a scaled score, which is a shift from the percentage-based system used for the former Grade Six Achievement Test.
But Mr. Speid complained that the system is new to him and other school administrators.
"Even if you are going in a better direction, that should be communicated to the system before the start of the school year," he said Wednesday evening.
"That was never said to us," he asserted when asked by Beyond The Headlines host Dionne Jackson Miller whether the new system had not been communicated to him earlier.
Mr. Speid said the new system has caught administrators off guard because throughout their preparation for PEP, schools had been administering tests to students and giving students percentage grades.
"If you change that now to a band system, scale system, as they call it, not even the parents, not even the teachers will understand clearly what this thing is saying. Which child or which parent is going to sit down and go through in detail a four-page thing?" he contended.
Tricked?
Mr. Speid believes the scale system has come about because "the ministry has seen now that the results are so poor, that they are going to be trying now to trick the people into believing that even if you get 20 per cent you have passed because...if you get 20 per cent and that's the highest in the overall scores, then that will put you up in a position where you fall in the top scale."
However, Winnie Berry, Chief Executive Officer (acting) in the Ministry of Education, has denied that the ministry is attempting to trick the public or hide information.
"We are doing what is in the best interest of our students and can stand up to any international scrutiny. Of course it's going to take some time, given the new approach and mindset change that is needed, but I say to you that this Primary Exit Profile seeks not to put our children at a disadvantage; it seeks only to find out not just what our students know, but what they can do," she asserted.
Ms Berry, who was speaking on the Morning Agenda on Power 106 Thursday morning, also denied that the scaled score system was announced for the first time this week.
She said at a media briefing at the ministry's Heroes Circle offices in December last year, Maryah Ho-Young, Senior Education Officer in the Students Assessment Unit, announced that the ministry had decided to use scaled scores, instead of percentage scores.
Details were also given on how the system would work.
A check by RJR News confirmed this to be true.
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