Petrina Francis, Staff Reporter

A section of the ministry paper, tabled in the House of Representatives on Wednesday by Minister of Education Andrew Holness, outlining the calculation of standard scores in the Grade Six Achievement Test.

The Ministry of Education is to, by next year, change the method it uses to report the results of students who sit the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT).

Andrew Holness, minister of education, said this was in a bid to make the process transparent and clear up any misunderstanding parents may have.

The imminent changes come as parents have been using the wrong method to calculate their children's averages.

Currently, the ministry reports the raw scores to schools and parents. But Holness said the ministry would now issue raw scores, standard scores, national average per child and the ranking of all students.

Standard scores are calculated for all papers and added to get the total standard score. The total standard score is used to rank the students for placement and to award scholarships.

Standard scores needed

According to a ministry paper tabled by Holness in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, standard scores are needed as all test papers do not have the same number of items.

It also noted that the GSAT placement and scholarship process require that the ministry use a total score for placement, because it was statistically unsound to add scores which are of different values.

The ministry paper states that students are placed in schools based on choice, gender, available places for each receiving school broken down by gender, ministry's proximity list and students' standard scores.

Automatic placement

The GSAT placement is about 95 per cent automatic. It starts with the computer ranking of all students with the child getting the highest scores being ranked one, down to the child with the lowest score. The child ranked number one is placed in his first choice followed by the one ranked two, and so on.

This continues until all the places in a school for a gender are filled. When the computer comes to placing another child on the list, whose first choice school is already full, it searches the child's second choice school for a place that matches the gender.

If the place is available, the child is placed in that school. If the place is not available it searches the third choice school for a place. If there is no place, it searches the fourth and the fifth choices.

If there is no place in any of the five schools chosen by a child, then the computer searches through the ministry's proximity list for a school with a place that matches that child's gender.

The remaining five per cent of students with the lowest scores are manually placed.

petrina.francis@gleanerjm.com