Exam day for thousands of Std. 6 students

While some of Belize’s primary school students where showing off their creativity at Parish Hall, thousands of their colleagues were feeling the heat of the most important exam of their young careers. Although it’s gone through a number of name changes, the Primary School Exam is still the benchmark for scholastic achievement. Today I looked for some answers of my own at the Ministry of Education.

Yvonne Davis, Education Officer, Natl. Exams

“They are still fighting with coming to terms with what this exam is trying to do, both the children and the teachers who are preparing them. It’s difficult to look at trend at this point because the exam is still new.”

Janelle Chanona, Reporting

The Primary School Examination first replaced the Belize National Selection Examination or B.N.S.E. in 2000. Since then, some startling statistics have emerged.

Students from private schools do better than those enrolled in government/church run institutions…Urban schools do better than rural primary schools…And on average, even though they do well in science, Belizean students have shown no marked improvement in math and English performance scores.

Yvonne Davis

“We have noticed in the performance papers, particularly in problem solving and in English that the children are lacking some basic skills. Recognition of sight words or spelling of sight words, simple sight words, words like “went” is misspelled and that is one of the regular words that we see each year on the P.S.E. So like the lack of some of the basic things in math, like multiplication tables. We have seen evidence of children not knowing their tables on the exam, multiplication with multiples of ten and a hundred, those are some of the basic things that we feel the children should come with from primary, that the children are leaving the system not knowing. So when they get into secondary school, they make it difficult on the secondary teachers, who have to put in extra and more time to move them up to a level where they should have come in with.”

And every year, more and more students are sitting the exam.

Yvonne Davis

“This year there are six thousand, one hundred and fifty seven candidates sitting the P.S.E. This is an increase of two hundred and twenty-four from last year. In 2002, there was an increase of four hundred children from 2001, so yes indeed the numbers are increasing each year. I believe the ministry is looking at the statistics that are coming out of the examination and I believe they are also looking at increasing the spaces at secondary to accommodate the children that are coming out of primary.”

Belize’s high schools fight to find space for all of them…but the sad reality is that even though the student population has continued to increase, the secondary schools’ expansion projects simply cannot keep up. The result? P.S.E. scores are increasingly used as the major determining factor for entry into high schools.

Yvonne Davis

“The children, who go to the examination room not feeling confident about their performance, would at the beginning, feel that they don’t stand a chance at the beginning at the examination. So for those children, who would start out that way, that they would let them feel right away that they don’t have a chance to get into secondary schools if the secondary schools are using that as the only criteria for getting into their schools. We have encouraged the secondary schools to look at more than the P.S.E. results, but to look at the reports from the schools and recommendations from the principals or teachers that have worked with these children before they decide to make their selections, in conjunction with the P.S.E. score.”

According to Davis, the students who sit the 2004 Primary School Exam will be tested in social studies, in addition to math, language arts and science.