Trinidad: Four students disqualified in CXC cheating scandal

(Trinidad Guardian) Four stu­dents who were caught cheat­ing dur­ing the CSEC Maths ex­am in May — af­ter a video was post­ed to so­cial me­dia show­ing them and oth­er stu­dents us­ing their cell-phones to share an an­swer sheet — have been dis­qual­i­fied.

This means they will not be grad­ed and will have to re-sit the ex­am at a lat­er date.

 
How­ev­er, just when they can re-sit the ex­am is yet to be de­ter­mined by the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC), based in Bar­ba­dos.

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia said the dis­qual­i­fied stu­dents “have been the ones that we could have eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied in the video, but CXC is still to de­cide whether or not they will be dis­qual­i­fied for a pe­ri­od of two years from all ex­ams.”

Af­ter they were caught cheat­ing, of­fi­cials al­low the stu­dents to com­plete their ex­ams but warned they would face se­vere con­se­quences fol­low­ing its’ con­clu­sion.

The in­ci­dent oc­curred at the Tran­quil­i­ty Gov­ern­ment Sec­ondary School. Three in­vig­i­la­tors were lat­er dis­missed as a re­sult.

In­ves­ti­ga­tions were car­ried out by both the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and CXC fol­low­ing claims that some stu­dents had re­fused to lodge their cell phones with school of­fi­cials on the day of the ex­am.

Both the MOE and CXC have strict poli­cies pro­hibit­ing the use of elec­tron­ic de­vices dur­ing ex­ams.

On May 16, CXC post­ed a short re­lease to its web­site which read, “The Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) has been made aware of a breach in ex­am­i­na­tion se­cu­ri­ty in Trinidad and To­ba­go. At this time we are work­ing close­ly with the Trinidad Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to con­duct an in­ves­ti­ga­tion sur­round­ing the re­port. Ap­pro­pri­ate cor­rec­tive ac­tion will be tak­en quick­ly to re­in­force ex­ist­ing se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures and to mit­i­gate any po­ten­tial im­pact.”

CSEC and CAPE re­sults out this week

The re­sults of the 2019 Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tion (CAPE) will be re­leased by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion (MOE) with­in the next two days.

This was con­firmed by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia on Sat­ur­day as he not­ed the Min­istry had com­plet­ed the CAPE analy­sis which re­vealed, “Our stu­dents are do­ing ex­cep­tion­al­ly well as the pass rate is 94 per cent.”

He said of­fi­cials were yet to com­plete the analy­sis of the CSEC re­sults but as­sured it would be done by Tues­day.

This de­lay was cre­at­ed af­ter the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) – which is re­spon­si­ble for set­ting the ex­ams – on­ly pre­sent­ed the min­istry with the CSEC re­sults late last week.

101 schools to be re­paired

Mean­while, Gar­cia said out of the 194 schools iden­ti­fied in the Ju­ly/Au­gust school re­pair pro­gramme work would be done on on­ly 101 of them.

He said the orig­i­nal list in­clud­ed 194 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools – he said it had been whit­tled down to 101 in the im­me­di­ate term.

How­ev­er, he as­sured the re­main­ing schools would be placed on the pri­or­i­ty list­ing for the next in­stall­ment of the va­ca­tion re­pair pro­gramme.

The Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (MTS) is re­spon­si­ble for car­ry­ing out the re­pairs.