The Editor, Sir:

Within six weeks over 50,000 of the nation's children will once again sit the Grade Six Achievement Test. This form of assessment for primary school leavers is celebrating its 7th milestone. The GSAT examination heralded a brilliant start as was the Common Entrance Examination in 1957. Despite the obvious difference between both examinations, it is noteworthy to recall that the two examinations came into being under a government led by the People's National Party (PNP).

However innovative an idea it was for the conception of the GSAT examination in the 1990s, such an examination discourages healthy competition among students, while at the same time it has encouraged laxity on their part. The quality of performance and output of the students in such examinations is totally unacceptable.

Common entrance carbon copy

As an educator, I then endorsed the move by the Ministry of Education to broaden the scope of the examinations sat by our final-year primary school students. But after the analysis of its performance over these many years, I have discovered that this present form of assessment is a carbon copy of the outdated Common Entrance Examination. To defend my line of reasoning I put it to all of us, that it is the same quality students that are awarded a place to the so-called 'Traditional High School'. The bulk of our students are placed in the newly-upgraded high schools that were once called Secondary Schools when the Common Entrance was in full swing.

Because of the inequality in the educational system and its inequities, those students who are awarded a place to the 'just come' high schools do not have the educational privileges that their contemporaries enjoy in the traditional schools. I am afraid to say that the more we change is the more we remain the same and even end up worse.

Something has got to be done to arrest the declining interest among the students, as well as to return to the days when all that matters is a good performance in these examinations. One gets the impression that the students have become complacent and are settling for mediocrity because whether they do well or not they will be attending a high school.

Revisiting the examination

I am proposing that the policymakers revisit the examination and if possible do an overhaul of it to make it reflect more quality than quantity. When our students do not do well in these examinations, too many fingers are pointed at the teachers, and parents do believe that teachers have all the answers to their child's disabilities and lack of interest. The GSAT examinations have not proved a viabl to its predecessor 'the Common Entrance Examinations'. So, where do we go from here? Our able Minister of Education the Honourable Maxine Henry-Wilson along with her team of educational thinkers will be better able to disarm the society of any weird perception it might hold about such examinations. The time is now!

I am, etc.,

HARVEY BROWN

harveybrown2007@yahoo.com

Principal of a rural primary school