The Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate, or C-SEC for short, is generally sat by high school-leaving students in the Caribbean in May and June. SEC subjects are examined for certification at the General and Technical Proficiencies in 33 subjects, 28 subjects at the General Proficiency and five at the Technical Proficiency. It has also expanded to a six-point grading system, from one to six in overall grades, or from A to F in profile grades. The results are out for 2013 and from the looks things, while Belize did well in some areas, it also lost ground in others. And what’s of concern is that only 43 percent of our students who sat the exams received acceptable grades between one and three. But according to the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Local Registrar, Juan Vargas, the overall performance remained generally the same. He said that when compared to our students’ performance last year, Belize did better in 17 subjects while it did not do so well in 16 others, and in one subject, Home Economics Management, Belizean students kept the overall grade at the same level as last year’s.

JUAN VARGAS, LOCAL CXC REGISTRAR

“There are some salient things that we need to look at; some other things that we need to highlight when you look at individual subjects but more or less compared to what we did last year, it remains the same. Regarding the issues that we need to look at, I will speak to a comparison of what we had last year in Belize to what we had this year. We had over three thousand students who signed up for 34 of the 35 subjects for the CSEC subjects and we noticed this year that there is a two percent increase in terms of the students getting satisfactory of grades one, two and three. The English subject, we noticed that there was an increase this year; this year we got 74% and last year we had 62%; so, there is an 11.79% this year for English A, which is one of the subjects that people look at and highlight. If we look at English B, we noticed we got 69.19% in comparison to last year which was 64.68%; so, there is an increase of 4.5%. Overall you notice in acceptable grades, 1 – 3, we noticed that this year it was 75.07% compared to 74%; so, there was a slight increase in terms of the satisfactory level for the CSEC candidates.

MARION ALI

“How did we do in Math?”

JUAN VARGAS, LOCAL CXC REGISTRAR

“Mathematics has been one of the subjects that indeed has been a challenge every year. If you look at Mathematics this year, overall we got 43.09% of acceptable grades, 1 – 3 in comparison to last year 45.99%. So, Mathematics has declined a bit; as a matter of fact, Mathematics has always ranged in the fifty percent and lower hence every year, we target the subject for continuous professional development. As a matter of fact, last week we concluded CPDs for several subjects including English A, English B and Mathematics.”

In other subject areas such as Spanish, the Sciences and Social Studies, Belize also gained in some areas while our performance waned in others. Vargas shares those details.
JUAN VARGAS, LOCAL CXC REGISTRAR “If you look at subjects such as IT; we noticed that this year we 77.6% acceptable grades compared to last year which was 88.71%; there was a decrease of eleven percent. IT has always been a challenge as well. “

MARION ALI

“What about Spanish?”

JUAN VARGAS, LOCAL CXC REGISTRAR

“Spanish has been steady; last year we got 90% with acceptable grades and last year it was 90%. Social Studies, this year it was 76% and last year it was 83%; so, there is a decrease of 7%. In the sciences, if you look at Physics, this year we had 80% and last year we had 82%. If we look at other popular subjects such as Biology; this year we have 75%; last year we had 77% and in Chemistry, this year it’s 66% and last year we had 61%; so, we see an increase in Chemistry.”

With reference to students who sat the CAPE subjects, which stands for Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams, Vargas said that 89 students received satisfactory grades from one to five.

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