The dates for the administering of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) remain unchanged, Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand has confirmed.
Following CXC’s announcement on Wednesday of a delay by two weeks in the administering of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), this newspaper contacted Manickchand yesterday and she confirmed that the Grade Six placement exam dates remain the same. The NGSA exams will be administered on August 4 and 5 which is after CXC’s exams would have been completed, Manickchand said.
On Wednesday, the registrar of CXC, Dr Wayne Wesley, announced that the CXC exams are now scheduled to be administered from June 28. Manickchand had previously said that a change in the dates for the CXC assessments could significantly impact the NGSA dates. She had explained that the NGSA dates were decided based on CXC’s exam dates and to ensure that the NGSA would be administered outside of CXC’s timeline. However, Manickchand has explain-ed that the dates scheduled will not impact the dates set for the NGSA because they still remain outside of the upper level exam’s timeline.
According to Dr Wesley, the CXC exams have been deferred for a further two weeks with results for the examinations expected to be available in the last week of September or the first week in October. The CXC examinations were previously scheduled to be administered between June 14 and July 16. The examination will be administered in its original format, which will consist of Papers 1 and 2. Paper 3/1 which is the School Based Assessment (SBA) and Paper 3/2 for private candidates, will also be included. SBAs are now due to be submitted on or before June 30 and candidates who do not wish to write the examinations this year now have up to May 31 to make this decision. To date, Wesley informed, 1,090 CSEC and 13,655 CAPE candidates have chosen the deferral option.
