MONTEGO BAY, St James — Owen Speid, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, says the organisation is satisfied with the methodology used by the Government for students’ Primary Exit Profile (PEP) placements.

“We were pretty pleased with what they did, in terms of using those scores to compute at first,” he said.

PEP is a series of assessments for grade four to six students at the primary level that has replaced the Grade Six Achievement Test. The assessments are used to provide an academic profile of students, their strengths and weaknesses, and their readiness for grade seven at the secondary level of the education system.

Last Friday the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Information released the results of the assessment and announced student placements which were done based on their grade four literacy and numeracy test scores, the grade five performance test results, and the results of the grade six ability test. The students should have also completed the competency-based test and the performance task in grade six, however, they were cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which saw schools being closed in March.

According to the education ministry, 100 per cent of the 38,918 students who were eligible for the PEP assessment have been placed in high schools. Eighty per cent of the cohort were placed in their school of preference, 16 per cent were placed according to the proximity of the school to their home, and the remaining four per cent were placed manually for a range of reasons, including access to special needs facilities.

Education Minister Karl Samuda said last Friday that this year’s PEP placements were “the most equitable way for the placement of students”.

Addressing the JTA’s St James annual general meeting via Zoom on Monday, Speid told the teachers that while most students would have preferred the top three placements out of the seven schools of their choice, some were placed in their fourth or fifth school of choice.

“The JTA is pretty satisfied that the Government did what it could do to, first of all, come up with the scores, because under the circumstances some of the exams weren’t done. So, some sections of the exams at the grade six level were not done, and we have to understand that in times of crisis you have to adjust and do some things differently,” stated Speid.

He, however, said that there is still a challenge among most people with understanding the scores.

“People should be taken to do short courses to understand how they compute these scores to arrive at these scores, and indeed the percentage scores would have been better, as we have said. It would be easier for teachers, it would be easier for students to understand, [and] it would be easier for parents to understand if you put the percentage there. But, as we see it, you would know that if the score is closer to 400 than 200, then you have performed a little bit better than those who might have got a score closer to the 200 mark,” stated Speid.