Opposition spokesperson on education and community development, Senator Damion Crawford says the government needs to conduct a thorough analysis of the country’s mathematics pass rate to uncover reasons for the high volume of failure.

Pointing out that too many students continue to “scrape through” external exams, Crawford says while a Grade 3 is considered a pass at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations, the vast majority of the nation’s students were on the brink of failure.

“We call upon the ministry to do the adequate research into the reasons for these outcomes because in addition to the small number that have been successful, the vast majority would have what we call ‘scrape through’, would have gotten a three,” he said. “We congratulate those who get anything that would have been a pass, but we must analyse that the majority of our children, even those who would have passed, would have been on the brink of that success.”

Crawford went on to give details from his own research as he revealed that the ‘writing was on the wall’ based on the number of students who were considered highly proficient at the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) level.

“I move to 2019, this cohorts’ PEP mathematics (pass rate) would have been 41 per cent and it goes to explain therefore, that one of the reasons we may have for this cohort’s CXC pass at math being at 33 per cent. In doing the analysis I became very concerned because even at the PEP level, high proficiency was only 2624 of the 40, 000 students that did the exams,” he shared. “Almost 37,000 would not have been in the category of high proficiency.”

On Monday, Education Minister Fayval Williams, in response to widespread outcries from parents and educators alike about “difficulties” with the design of the assessment tool for the PEP exams, told the Observer that there will be a review.

“As I probe into it I understand that all the exam questions do come from teachers, but given the fact that more and more persons are saying: ‘Look at this, look at this,’ we will examine this, because PEP has been around for six to seven years and we can examine it,” the education minister said. “We don’t want the children to feel that this exam is so excruciatingly hard; that’s not the purpose of an exam. So, you will hear more from us as we interrogate the content, the types of questions and so forth.”