And while that is the good news – there is the bad. Roughly only 40% of the students who sat the primary school examination received an overall grade of C or above. In the subjects it is more telling.
- In science, 65% of the students received grade C or above.
- In Social Studies, 54% received grade c or above.
- In math it is dismal where of the 6,858 students who sat the exam, only 23% or 1,629 students received grade C or above.
- In fact in math, the bulk of the students, more than 4,000 of them, got a grade E which is the lowest possible score. In English 47% got C or above.
- Again if you do the math then – only 2,629 students – or close to 40% got an overall average grade of C or above.
So what does all this mean? Well head of the Examination Unit Yvonne Davis isn’t all that surprised. She says that if you study the numbers - this is all part of a trend which she explained.
Yvonne Davis, Director – Examinations Unit
“There is no significant difference in the way the students have been performing over the year because to look at this year’s performance, you
also want to look at how the performance has been over the ten years of the PSE, this is the tenth year of the PSE so you want to also look at that. You will notice that in 2004 and 2008, there were would, I would say, two years of improvements, we could say spikes, I would say spikes in the performance but overall there has been a steady flow in terms of how the subjects have been performing from 2000 to 2009.”
Keith Swift,
So math for example has gone down.
Yvonne Davis,
“For this year it has been 46.5 but it is more or less the same it has been from 2000 to 2007. If you notice the trend, it is more or less the same. It has been that way for a while and we have always reported math as the weakest subject and in particular the math paper two which is the problem paper. It is the application of the concepts and there is the significant difference between the performance on math paper one and that of math paper two.
English has remained more or less constant. We are seeing improvement in the writing papers across the country even though there is still a lot of room for improvement. There is hope with the English papers, we’ve seen good writing.
Social studies paper is also at the satisfactory level and so that is about 60% mastery which is fairly good but like I said there is still room for improvement. For that paper, some of the concepts in social studies as it relates to map reading and extracting information from tables, analyzing the graphs and some of the statistics that are produced, those are basically some of the problems we find on the social studies paper.”
Keith Swift,
And then what can you tell us about science which seems to have gone down?
Yvonne Davis,
“Science, notice that in 2004 there is a spike with the science performance but more or less, to me science is the one that has the most fluctuation. It is not as steady as the English and the math. To me it is the one with the most fluctuation.”
The top finishers will be honoured at an awards ceremony later this month.
