Dear Editor,
The General Education Development (GED) programme was advertised as a hope for Guyanese; an opportunity for Guyanese everywhere, who did not gain passes of 5 subjects at CXC, to have a “do-over” of their education and a chance to secure a proper job or enter a university and further studies upon completion of the GED course, that was supposed to last six (6) months.
It’s been nine (9) months since the course started. The “lecturers” stopped all classes since early February of 2023.
We were told we would be writing our final examinations late February or early March and was advised to continue studying.
As the time grew closer, we anticipated our final examinations since we’ve studied and put in a lot of work, submitting every course work as they came.
I was amongst the many who were called and told that final examinations will be done between March 27th to 31st and I was given the option of which day I would prefer to sit my exams. Some other people had letters sent to their jobs from the Georgetown American University requesting time off to facilitate the writing of the examination. All exams were indicated to be written at ‘ATC’ in Georgetown. Keep in mind, persons taking the GED course are from areas all through Guyana, such as Berbice, Lethem and Linden. So if persons from those areas were called to write exams on this date they would have had to start making preparations as to all necessary out of town accommodations. All this, only to be sent an email on the day of the 27th to say that the exams were cancelled.
Students voiced their frustrations in WhatsApp groups and were met with a lot of arrogant and discourteous replies. As though we are not supposed to ask when our final exam would be.
About two weeks after the cancellation of our exams we were sent a link for an online mock exam and were told to complete the mock exam and send our results to our mentors and persons with “low scores” would not be able to write the actual exam.
We were also told that after sending our mock exam score to our mentors, we would be given a voucher along with a date to write our exams, so we went ahead and did the mock exam for all four (4) subjects (Mathematics, Science, Social-Studies and Language Arts).
The GED course was introduced as a “Free” course but now our mentors are making sure to tell us that every subject cost about $80USD, which would be paid by the government but if we don’t pass a subject we would have to pay that money to write it back.
One mentor explained that they are only able to take a small amount of people at a time to do the exams because of the location they were given to do the exams in.
Now every week or every other week, when we grow even more impatient and ask about the date for our final examinations, the reply would be, “we are awaiting word from GOAL (Guyana Online Academy of Learning) “.
Now we are being told that they don’t yet have the funds to pay for our exams, so, I was surprised to see, only recently, the Minister of Education on video trying to recruit new persons for a new GED course, when so many persons have dropped out of this first batch alone out of sheer frustration and yet we still can’t get a straightforward date for our exams.
P.S. We just want to be done with this everlasting course.
Regards,
A frustrated GED student
