Dear Editor,
Once again I write to remind parents, students, teachers and other concerned citizens that the Primary School Exam (PSE) in mathematics needs major overhaul.
The PSE is not helping to build our nation. The syllabus is not focused properly, and the essential topics are not emphasized. I was shocked when in the multiple choices paper there was a question on transformational geometry. Most of our students are not even competent in the basics. We need to emphasize the basics because a lot of our students graduate from primary school and can’t do the four basic operations with numbers (add, subtract, multiply and divide).
Question 10 on the problem solving part of the exam was too complicated for primary school. It is equivalent to a Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate question on consumer arithmetic – totally inappropriate for primary school.
I would like to commend the ministry for putting computation of fractions on the problem solving paper this year. My aim is to improve the exam so that our students could get a quality education. It would be good to use the exam as an instrument of change and improvement rather that mere selection.
What is the ministry doing with the exam at lower primary? I believe, like Dr. Didacus Jules, Registrar for the Caribbean Examination Council. He said, “The biggest problem of education in the Caribbean today is not teachers or student performance. It is with the Ministries of Education; it is the absence of clearly defined policies and a strategic sense of where we are going and what we need to get there.”
On Tuesday, May 24, 2011, at an International Conference on Education for CARICOM in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Dr. Jules explained the situation in the Caribbean. He said, “The reality is, one of the problems of assessment in the Caribbean is that we are over-testing our children. There are many Ministries of Education that have all kinds of national examinations testing and testing our kids, and to what use is that testing being put? It is not used for policy decisions, but we keep testing.”
I hope that something is done to improve this exam. We need serious action. Our young people are dying on the street and there is a direct correlation between their failure in school and there failure in life!
Yours truly,
Mr. Brian Plummer
Math and Science Instructor