Campbell's Commentary - CXC AND THE FALL SEMESTER. GOING BACK TO BASICS

By Aubrey Campbell

NEW YORK, NY. Wednesday, October 7, 2020 -- Folks, only yesterday, we said welcome to the month of October and we are already six days jn. Hard to believe in pretty much the same way it hard to digest the disgusting theatre being paraded across the television screen for ‘breaking news’ these past few days!

After making a mockery of Joe Biden wearing a mask, Captain Commando put on a mask and told his staff he had the virus and he needs to go to the hospital. The ‘fake news’ media went wall to wall with coverage and in the process, knocked Biden’s surging campaign off the golf course for a hole in one!

Talk about a master stroke!

What’s that song…You pick him up, you lick him down, what a hard man fi dead!

I will leave it at that for the time being. There is still some ways to go, like 28 days, hence!

What I really want to spend some time on today, is a matter that was the subject of my conversation last week and that is the CXC results and going back to school for the Fall semester, in Jamaica and the Caribbean region, or what’s left of it.

Last week, while celebrating the outstanding students who ‘aced’ the regional exams at both the CXC (Ordinary) and CAPE (Advanced) levels, I asked that you hold the champagne for a bit longer after news surfaced that the results were fraught with anomalies, forcing governments to call for an investigation to determine what went wrong.

COVID 19 is to be blamed for sure but that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Turns out that the chair of the Barbados-based Caribbean Examinations Council, and Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Sir Hilary Beckles, has agreed that some things were amiss and need further review.

That process is expected to be completed inside the next ten (10) days and while time is of the essence, an investigation should not be rushed, if the findings are to be meaningful.

Think it thru!

What if all those students who have already celebrated their ten (10) and eleven (11) distinctions, wake up tomorrow morning to find out that such celebrations were premature?

Take for example, what’s being reported in the Jamaican newspapers that two well known schools in ‘Upper St. Andrew’ – in the voice of someone with a stiff upper lip, lol – scored zero percent passes in English!

Are you kidding me!

Unless the native language is now Jamaican, which, fortunately, I write and speak very well, mind you!

LMAO!

And what is this I’m hearing/reading that one of the school in question, failed to upload/forward to the CXC HQ, the school-based assessment (SBA) portion of the students’ work, resulting in questionable grades, which now a part of the ‘anomalies’ being investigated?

If I’m not mistaken, the SBA accounts for some forty percentile of the total mark/grade of the ‘paper’.

Last week, after speaking to my source, a senior teacher at a prominent high school in Montego Bay, I was made to understand that due to the pandemic and the need for social distancing, CXC decided to penny pinch, offering a measly sum to exam markers.

That offer came back to bite them on their asses, as they lost quality markers and those that took the offer were sub-standard, resulting in serious discrepancies in the grading of papers.

How do you explain a Grade 7 (First Form) student acing English Language and a Grade 11 (Fifth Form) student getting ‘no grade’?

And, don’t come tell me ‘bout no ‘gifted’ student!

One is either a morning star and the other a dunce bat!

‘Hinglish is yuh nahtiv tongue’. Oops! but this is Jamaican, not English. You see my trail?

DWL

Folks. What bothers me in all of this, and which I alluded to last week, and corroborated by my source, is the fact that exam fees are exorbitant and CXC is without mercy. You either pay up or sit out!

Another area that the investigation is bound to address.

As Vice President of my Alumni Association, I know for a fact that whether it’s for one student or fifty students, the request for assistance with exam fees, is as perennial as the grass!

And while I’m on the matter of alumni associations, it was very sobering to read that some 400,000 students are in limbo as the Fall semester, what I know as the Christmas term, opened remotely across the island on Monday morning.

‘Limbo’ might be a nice word here because the picture painted by the news story is one where 1000s of students will be left behind, as the pandemic has forced everything online and in the virtual space.

With a critical shortage of e-learning devices and limited internet access, the fall out will be huge. Again, God bless those alumni associations with the resources and where-with-all to assist their alma mater with building out an e-learning platform, complete with devices (tablets), however limited the numbers are.

Listen to what one principal said during a virtual meeting with the alumni body on the weekend, that some students will have to rely on their parent’s smart phone to access the e-learning platform. So, what happens when that parent is away from home?

Like you, I’m asking myself, when will it end?

COVID be damned!

And BTW. Before I forget. Husbands, take your wives to the doctor. Early detection saves lives. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM).

You have the floor.

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Editor’s note. Aubrey Campbell is a career Broadcast/Journalist and producer/host of Caribbean Conversation, airing Sundays, 3 – 5 pm, on the Caribzone Media Network at; www.Facebook.com/caribzone.