KINGSTON, Jamaica – The Ministry of Education and Youth is working with the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) and the Overseas Examinations Commission (OEC) to implement strategies to minimise the recurrence of breaches in the administration of examinations in the country.

These measures include an audit of safety cabinets for examinations, the installation of CCTVs and the retraining of personnel who are integral to the examination process.

The OEC office is the local Registrar in Jamaica for CXC examinations.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education and Youth, Dr Kasan Troupe, provided an update during Wednesday’s post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House in St Andrew.

Last year, there were reports of breaches regarding Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination papers in the country.

Dr Troupe informed that the matter was reported to the police and investigations continue, noting that the stolen cabinet with the examination papers has not been retrieved or recovered.

“It really cost us as a country. It was very embarrassing for our minister to sit in a regional meeting of ministers and for CXC to be explaining that there is a breach that will impact other students and for us to be taking full responsibility and apologising for the disruption that had happened at that time,” she said.

“The future of Jamaica really sits on excellence within our schools and we need our communities to support our schools. We need all hands on deck. For persons to break into our school and to remove an examination cabinet that disrupted a lot of things, it created psychological disruption for the students. We had to put a number of systems in place to make sure that the other exams could have been done and students could resist their exams,” the permanent secretary said.

She informed that the OEC is undertaking an audit of all safety cabinets in schools.

“They are specially built for this, with special codes. So, we are going to make sure that all of those systems are working,” Dr Troupe said.

“The last deliberations we had with OEC is to add to their budget the security feature of CCTV (closed circuit television) cameras, either to attach that to the cabinet itself or to instal that in the location of the cabinet, so we can have instant footage of what’s happening around the papers,” the permanent secretary added.

She said principals will also be retrained to ensure that they observe exam protocols.

“We get the sense from the audit that some of the expectations were relaxed a bit because over the years the exams were done with the same team. The OEC will also be strident and vigilant with who are selected to be exam managers for each school. We rely on those persons,” she said.

The permanent secretary urged principals to be conscious and mindful of the regulations regarding access to examination papers, and to ensure that the necessary standards are in place.

“We are asking for no compromise regardless of your circumstance. We are going to be vigilant with those we have selected to work for us. The OEC will also do some spot checks on the days, so they will be having persons going in randomly to see what’s happening and making sure that the papers are delivered. Once it is written, we are going to be collecting, because we have had cases where papers are stored and missing and other persons would have been compromised because of that,” she said.

Dr Troupe said the integrity of the examinations must be protected and urged all stakeholders to work together to ensure that this is done.

“We cannot as a country afford another experience of this nature. It was very embarrassing for us and it’s also a cost factor. For CXC to provide an alternative paper for our students, the Government had to foot that bill because we could not have asked parents to pay that cost again,” she noted.

“We have to stand together to fight for our country, to fight for our institutions, and we must stand for integrity. We must protect the integrity of our exams,” the permanent secretary added.

– JIS