FOR years, Jamaica has wrestled with how best to teach and assess its students. As pedagogical practices have evolved, teachers have been required to diversify assessment and move beyond the one-sizefits-all approach.

Across many institutions, teachers have responded creatively by giving alternative assessments a meaningful place in students’ grades. During my time as an educator at The Queen’s School, I saw the value of this approach firsthand when I assigned students Mathematics topics and invited them to teach their classmates.

It was brilliant to watch students step into the role of teacher, facilitate engagement activities, and lead the exploration phase of their lessons. One student remains unforgettable: Arianna Campbell. At grade eight, she taught a new concept with such command that her classmates were able to make sense of it. Leading the group’s charge the lesson showed that education is not simply about solving a Mathematics problem; it is about understanding a concept well enough to communicate it, defend one’s thinking, respond to questions, and make knowledge accessible to others.

Many teachers are already employing alternative assessments. But it is all good and dandy until our students are tried by the Caribbean Examinations Council through Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), prompting educators to return to standardised testing because it still carries the greatest consequence.

And herein lies the contradiction.

We tell teachers to develop critical thinkers and innovators and to embrace creativity, inquiry, collaboration, problem- solving, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics (STEAM). Then we allow a student’s educational fate to be heavily influenced by performance within a standardised examination structure.

Are we preparing children for the future, or preparing them to pass an examination?

THE CREATIVITY CONTRADICTION

Students can design, build, investigate, collaborate, research and solve authentic problems in our classrooms. But if the assessment system ultimately rewards them primarily for reproducing knowledge under examination conditions, we have a contradiction.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recognises creativity and critical thinking as competencies that education systems must deliberately develop and assess. Its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) creative-thinking assessment examines students’ ability to generate, evaluate and improve ideas — abilities that narrow assessment formats struggle to capture. Jamaica should be paying attention: In PISA 2022, only 26 per cent of Jamaican 15-year-olds attained at least Level 2 proficiency in mathematics, compared with 69 per cent across OECD countries. That should trigger more than another call for students to do past papers. It should force us to ask whether we are preparing students to answer familiar questions or to use mathematics to solve problems they have never encountered.

THE STEM IRONY

The irony is almost painful. Jamaica is investing heavily in STEM, including a $3.7-billion contract signed in June 2026 for the country’s first STEM academy at Bernard Lodge. Bernard Lodge is not intended to stand alone. The Ministry of Education has announced plans for six STEAM academies by 2029, featuring advanced laboratories and spaces for digital innovation, robotics and the creative arts. It has also reported 21 primary-level STEM Smart Labs and investment in upgraded Technical and Vocational Education and Training and future-skills laboratories.

We need scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technology specialists and innovators. But what happens when the child leaves the STEM classroom and enters the examination room?

Can our assessment system recognise the creativity, experimentation, collaboration and problem-solving that STEM education is supposed to cultivate, or are we building classrooms of the future while assessing students with instruments shaped by the past?

To be fair, CXC has not ignored alternative assessment. Yet in July 2026, it announced that traditional School-Based Assessments in non-practical subjects, including Mathematics, would be phased out and replaced by Paper 032 under examination conditions. That decision does not settle this debate; it makes it more urgent.

WE HAVE BEEN FAILING THE SKILL SET

We have failed to recognise the full skill set of our students. Year after year, they are stifled, tried, and judged by examination performance, while stakeholders demand that teachers make them future-ready without sufficiently questioning whether our assessment systems are future-ready.

We tell students to think outside the box, then teach them to colour inside examination lines. We promote collaboration and technology, then we place them in examination rooms where collaboration becomes cheating and technology becomes a threat to assessment.

Something is fundamentally wrong with that contradiction.

CXC HAS BECOME THE PRIVY COUNCIL OF EDUCATION

As a Jamaican student who is now an educator training educators, I believe the conversation about reparations cannot be reserved for the United Kingdom. There is a reckoning due right here in Jamaica, and CXC must be part of it.

Too many Jamaican lives have been narrowed by CSEC results, and too much student creativity has been constrained by an examination system that can make one assessment profile feel like a final verdict. The question is: When will those students receive acknowledgement, redress and reform?

Every May and June, creative minds enter examination rooms crying, “We want justice”. Their skills cry for justice. Their creativity cries for justice. This is not simply a demand for compensation; it is a demand for an assessment system that recognises their full humanity and potential.

CSEC has become the Privy Council of education — the final court before which students are judged. Yet there has been too little serious discussion about whether it should remain our final educational court.

There are more than 180 countries in the world. For how many of those futures can one regional examination body reasonably claim to prepare our children?

THE BUSINESS PLAN NEEDS REWRITING

CXC has remained remarkably loyal to traditional forms of assessment even as the world, the workplace, technology, artificial intelligence, STEM and pedagogy have evolved. So why shouldn’t assessment evolve?

This is not an argument against Caribbean standards, accountability, rigorous assessment or even CXC. It is an argument for a system brave enough to measure what it claims to value: Creativity, innovation, critical thinking and experimentation.

CXC, teachers and students are not the enemy. The enemy is an assessment culture that refuses to ask whether the things we measure are still the things that matter most.

Jamaica does not simply need students who can pass examinations. It needs people who can solve problems that examinations have never seen.

If CXC wants to remain the final court in Caribbean education, perhaps it is time for the court itself to face trial: Are we preparing our children for the world that exists, or for the examination system we inherited?

Our children deserve better than a future determined by a paper. They deserve an education.

Neison Williams is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at The Mico University College. E-mail williamsneison0509@gmail. com/neison.williams@themico.edu.jm.