A student of the Success Elementary School has topped the country in this year’s National Grade Six Assessment examinations.
A number of students from the same school have captured many of the other top positions.
The top student, Nirvana Wimal gained 524 marks out of a possible 527 marks.
A total of 39 students shared the top 10 spots this year, and were drawn from both public and private schools.
This year saw improved performances in English and Social Studies, while there was a decline in the performance recorded for Mathematics and Science.
Mathematics saw its lowest pass rate percentage in four years with 36.5% of the students passing the subject.
English saw its pass rate reaching 65.7% which is the highest in the past four years.
Social Studies also recorded its highest pass rate in four years at 56.3% while the overall pass rate for science went down to 40%.
Education Minister Priya Manickchand acknowledged that it was a difficult year for education and the national examinations as students and teachers battled the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This has been a hard hard year for education, all over the world, it has been a hard year for the parents, it has been a worrying year for the teachers and a year of anxiety for the students,” Manickchand said.
But Ms. Manickchand said despite the challenges faced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the students still performed well overall and she is pleased with that.
“We know that schools were closed since March 2020 and these children who wrote this exam, the last time they were in face-to-face contact with the teacher was in Grade 5…And we saw how parents gather themselves up, pulled themselves together and started doing much more we ever thought,” the Minister said.
Earlier this week, the Ministry of Education announced a decision to have the Caribbean Examinations Council take full control of the NGSA exams.
CXC has been setting the exams since 2016, but it will now take on additional responsibilities including reviews.
“What we were seeing were results that didn’t match professional measurement and evaluation. One year we high, one year we low, and the graph is not consistent and so on. And CXC is the CARICOM body that has all the expertise in this and started in 2016, CXC began in 2016 to set the exams, supervise them, mark them, this year, we have expanded their role,” the Education Minister explained.
Meanwhile, the Education Ministry is concerned with the number of students who did not write the examinations and has already put systems in place to reach out to the parents in an effort to get the children back in school.
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