St. John’s Antigua: Four new subjects are to be placed on the CAPE syllabi which are Entrepreneurship Education, Food Agriculture and the Environment, Performing Arts, and Tourism, according to an Observer report. The Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) is expanding its offerings as the Caribbean Examination Council seeks to “ensure global human resource competitiveness of the Caribbean through the provision of quality assurance in education and comprehensive certification”.
The CAPE examinations is designed to provide certification of the academic, vocational and technical achievement of students in the Caribbean who wish to further their education, having completed a minimum of five years in the secondary school system.
The Observer said that Senior Assistant of the Examinations Administration and Security Division, Susan Giles, told reporters at a recently held stakeholder workshop in Barbados that the new components will be very critical to the syllabus and CXC’s regional qualification framework, the Observer said.
“These syllabuses are right now in the development stages. We will be putting them out in the schools, the syllabuses are out two years in advance but they go the year before so that the students can comment and the teachers to give us their feedback,” Giles said.
After the consultation phase with SUBSEC, a division within CXC, the approved syllabus and copies of the specimen examination papers, keys and mark schemes will be distributed to schools in May-June 2013, for the first examination in May- June 2014.
The Observer reported that meantime the examination body will also be moving towards electronic marking as a way to cut back on major expenses.
Speaking on the matter, Giles said this would save the council millions spent annually in accommodation and airfare spent moving teachers around to and from marking venues.
She said during the marking period, more than 22,000 teachers are moved to Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados at a significant cost to CXC, which is currently unsustainable.
Apart from hotel accommodations, CXC provides living, meal and travelling allowances for markers across the region.
“These are significant cost for us and it is a very large part of our budget, we are therefore looking towards electronic marking, and as I speak now we are working on this.”
Giles said the major difficulty in this endeavour would be the depth of Internet penetration in the region and the lack of Internet access, the Observer stated.
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