Checking of P.S.E. underway

The second sitting of the Primary School Examinations took place on May fourth. Over the weekend, ninety-two markers, twenty-four table leaders and ten supervisors were correcting the exams at the District Education Center in West Landivar. Yvonne Davis, Principal Education Officer, says the checking will be complete on Thursday. But despite the fact that some students did not attend due to the flu scare, there are hopeful about the testing results.

Yvonne Davis, Principal Education Officer
“Every year we had two hundred candidates do not sit the test for whatever reason. We had about that amount on day one and on day two we had just a little bit more. So there are about ten students that we will need to give another educational opportunity to, to ensure that they get a chance to do their P.S.E. Those were the ones that were identified by the centre as those exhibiting flu like symptoms we had asked them to look for. You will recall that the second part of P.S.E. was administered on the fourth of May and that’s about two weeks ago. And so we have embarked on marking the papers from that administration. Over the weekend the teachers were involved in marking the Mathematics Paper two, which is the application paper; it’s a problem solving paper, where the students are or were required to show workings for particular problems and concepts that were tested at that time.”

Rosenda McCulloch, Supervisor, P.S.E.
“There are ten tables and each table does one of the problems. There are ten problems totally. I worked at tables three and four so I can say for tables three and four that while the children had the ideas for the most part, well many of them had full marks, for those who had difficulty, they had some idea of what they needed to do but somewhere along the line got tangled.”

Elswith Lopez, Table Leader
“Most of the children were able to plot their graphs. They were able to do most of what was asked for. However, there was inconsistency using scales, the scaling as such. I guess some of them perhaps did not understand the term “mean” so they were not able to find that.”

Jose Sanchez
“You’ve checked this exam before, right?”

Elswith Lopez
“Yes.”

Jose Sanchez
“Can you tell at this point whether they are doing a bit better based on what you’ve seen?”

Elswith Lopez
“Well, for sure when it comes to the graph, yes there has been vast improvement. I can say most of the children are really trying but there is much to be done.”

Davis says that the results of the P.S.E. will be released next week.