Head of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS) Anniona Jones says the Caribbean Examinations Council’s (CXC) overhaul of School-Based Assessments (SBAs) is necessary to protect academic integrity, but believes it is possible that pass rates could decline initially as students adapt to the new system.

Speaking with the Jamaica Observer on Tuesday, Jones said principals understand why CXC has moved to reform one of the Caribbean’s longest-standing assessment methods, arguing that the integrity of students’ work must be protected even as schools adapt to new technologies.

However, she cautioned that the transition will require significant adjustments by teachers and students, particularly in subjects for which coursework has long been used to develop critical thinking and contribute to final grades.

Last week, CXC announced that traditional SBAs will be phased out for several non-practical subjects, including mathematics, English, Caribbean history, social studies, as well as principles of business.

Those subjects will instead be assessed through paper 032, which students will complete under examination conditions after receiving the assessment topics about a month in advance. Practical disciplines such as agricultural science, visual arts, technical drawing, music, physical education, and food, nutrition and health will retain SBAs because they require students to demonstrate practical competencies that cannot be adequately measured in a written examination.

Jones said principals were encouraged that CXC had retained project-based assessments in practical and technical subjects and had preserved opportunities to assess higher-order thinking in other areas through the redesigned paper 032.

“We understand the ‘why’ behind it. Some persons are still concerned that with AI not going anywhere, that the removal of the school-based or project-based learning across subjects may send the wrong signal that what we were hoping to assess by the SBA we still can’t assess using another modality, and that’s not the case. So we were very happy to hear that the paper three format and the skill sets that we really want to evaluate, to some degree, will still be able to be evaluated in those traditional grammar-based subjects,” she said.

She said the reforms were also necessary because concerns about the authenticity of SBAs extend beyond AI, acknowledging that the act of students paying to complete SBAs has become an established practice among some students.

“This is a big industry! But…here’s the thing, there is need for integrity [and] understanding that you’re cheating the child of the opportunity to develop valid skills that the tertiary sector and the world of work says they are missing. Employers are complaining about the lack of initiatives, problem-solving skills, critical thinking for even entry-level workers, and it comes back down to whether or not they were learning what they needed to learn in the first place,” Jones said.

Despite supporting the overall direction of the reforms, she warned that removing SBAs from several subjects could have unintended consequences for student performance, at least during the early years of implementation.

She noted that many students have traditionally depended on the coursework component to strengthen their overall grades, while teachers have designed much of their classroom instruction around preparing students for those assignments.

“So if we talk about a subject like history, for example, it would have been good to have the SBA, that’s project-based learning, where they’re writing a paper, they’re presenting a position on some historical figure or event. That’s always a good thing. Hence the reason that many of them went on AI and did what they needed to do, and we would have had to flag it; however, it would have guaranteed them a percentage of the 100,” she explained.

“But when that is now going to be evaluated purely by your capacity to think critically on a pen and paper test, it is very possible that we might see a decline in the pass rate in the first instance until we can recalibrate and compensate for whatever the outcomes are and go back to the drawing board of the teaching and the learning again, because we did primarily anchor a large part of how we taught to get those SBAs done,” she added.

Even so, Jones maintained that retaining SBAs in science, technical and vocational subjects was the right decision because those disciplines require students to demonstrate practical skills that cannot be fully assessed through written examinations alone.