TWO of Jamaica’s high school students have already qualified for the new associate degree on offer by the regional Caribbean Examination Council (CXC), a local official has advised.

Wesley Barrett, CXC pro-registrar, says the degrees were granted based on last year’s CAPE, the advanced level exams offered to sixth form high school students.

These results, he said, had been passed onto the Ministry of Education.

But still to be determined is whether major universities here will recognise the qualification.

Both the University of Technology (UTech) and Northern Caribbean University (NCU) say they continue to study the value of the degree, but already NCU is openly questioning the wisdom of applying tertiary level qualification to high school courses.

Dr William Smith, NCU vice president of academic administration, describes the associate degree as an ‘anomaly’ and ‘an institutional misfit’.

“To offer this degree in Caribbean high schools is a major departure from the blue print of the original programme and purpose of the (associate) degree. To offer it without ensuring that it is comprised of at least 60 credits of lower division baccalaureate courses would yet be another departure from the original standards,” said Smith in his written position to the Sunday Observer.

“If the expectation is that the recipients of the proposed degree are to benefit from the first two years of the undergraduate degree – as is the case in the United States – it would be an anomaly. The offering of a college degree in a high school setting is undoubtedly off the track and a misnomer.”

Barrett immediately hit back, saying that CAPE and its English equivalent, the GCE A’Levels, were both tertiary programmes.

“Anything after grade 11 is post secondary,” said Barrett, who, up to his retirement two years ago, was chief education officer at Jamaica’s education ministry, based at National Heroes Circle in the capital.

“The fact that it is delivered in a conventional secondary school doesn’t mean that the programme itself is a secondary programme.”

But Smith insists that if the CXC degree were to become normalised, high schools offering it would have to “radically change their upper divisions to become well-developed two-year colleges” to give validity to the degree.

He suggests that CXC rename the qualification, calling it a ‘Upper High School Certificate’ or ‘Senior High School Certificate’.

Both NCU and UTech say they are yet to decide whether students who acquire the new CXC associate degree will be eligible for credits and course exemptions normally granted to holders of other associate degrees, whether acquired locally or in the United States.

When CXC announced the degree last year, the examination and accreditation body said the qualification would be awarded, starting this year, to exam candidates achieving passes in a least seven units of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE).

For each associate degree, some units are compulsory, for example:

. Management of Business 1 and Management of Business 2 are compulsory for the associate degree in business studies;

. Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics for the associate degree in mathematics; and

. Computer Science 1 and Computer Science 2 for the associate degree in computer science:

Last year, CXC chairman Professor Kenneth Hall defended the CXC decision to award the degrees, saying that the council needed to provide students with as many options as possible, particularly at a time when more graduates would be moving across the region and internationally in the hunt for cross-border jobs.

The programme had been heavily criticised by Ruel Reid, president of the 20,000-strong Jamaica Teachers Association, and by education researcher Dr Dennis Minott – both pointing to the fact that the high schools were poorly equipped and under resourced, saying under those conditions they were unlikely to deliver a quality degree programme.

Even the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, where Hall was principal up to his mid-February appointment as Jamaica’s current governor general, was ambivalent about the degree, announcing that it would review the programme before taking a policy position on its acceptance for matriculation into the region’s premier 58-year-old institution.

As for its acceptance at NCU, Smith said holders of the CXC degree were unlikely to enjoy any advantage over students with A’Level and CAPE subjects.

“I do not perceive that graduates of the ‘High School-Associate’ degree,” the educator said pointedly, “will enter Northern Caribbean University on any other basis than exemption by credits for college courses adequately covered in equivalent high school subjects up to Grade 13.”

at UTech, senior vice president for academic affairs George Roper said that institution would put the issue to a number of committees.

“I think we will have definitive position in another month’s time,” he advised the Sunday Observer.

Roper said in deciding the value of associate degrees, UTech usually considers whether the degree is approved by an established accreditation body; and assesses the associate degree’s syllabus to determine areas of comparability with the degree being pursued at UTech.

The onus is on the student applicant who holds an associate degree to request transfer of credits towards his or her degree.

“It may be difficult to get ‘year exemptions’, but they could get ‘subject exemptions’,” Roper said of holders of associate degrees in general.

There were already, he said, instances of holders of CAPE subjects receiving subject exemptions at UTech.

Efforts to secure an updated comment from UWI Mona on its position were unsuccessful.

But Barrett said discussions between the CXC and the universities regarding credits from the associate degree “are ongoing”. He could give no timeframe, however, for those talks to be concluded, despite CXC’s decision to go ahead with the conferrals of the degree.

editorial@jamaicaobserver.com