SBAs, the easiest exam paper
Exams are the simplest component of T&T education. Secondary education exam SBAs are the simplest test papers. Every year local CXC students parrot the inherited contention that SBAs are a hard exam component. SBAs demand time, planning, thoughtfulness, focus, trouble-shooting, diligence, care and perseverance. Good skilling for kids to hone before graduating into the world of work. From my understanding, SBAs allow examination students to earn as much as 20 per cent (one fifth) of exam scores by doing projects. Exam candidates are given many weeks to finish these projects for the five to eight subjects they sign up to sit. Working on SBAs at home at their leisure is allowed.
Let us review. SBAs weigh all of a whole 20 per cent of final exam scores and they can be done at leisure at home over a numbers of weeks. How much easier than this do Trini kids want exams to be? Their counterparts across the Caribbean writing Ordinary and Advanced-levels under the banner of CXC don’t whine about SBAs. Furthermore, even if kids get one per cent on the SBA, they can still pass the exam through earning the other 80 per cent by writing the timetabled exam papers. Like I said, Trini kids aren’t seeing the pluses of this giveaway assessment. They are given a chance to enter exams with 20 per cent of the score already earned. But they let themselves get overcome by irrational thinking.
SBAs and timetabled exams are not stress. The stress emerge from the morbid, mundane, time wasting, fun averse, one-track mind, pedantic ritual procedures state educators force kids to comply with in the process of teaching. So from earliest school days children learn there is safety in faking performance to cool down brutish teachers. They fake liking to sing the anthem to please school authority. They recite the pledge to please school authorities. Adjust their uniforms, hair styles, penmanship, speech, political views, friendly allegiances, displays of affection, beliefs about living and loving as performances to please school authorities. And they fake learning by memorising facts long enough for regurgitation on tests to please school authorities.
Fake development of planning, thoughtfulness, focus, trouble-shooting, diligence, care and perseverance-skilling feed frustration thereby leading to failure to get SBAs done.
Rebellion is the aftermath of forced compliance, forced feelings of love, forced motivation to learn, forced respect for rules and authority in childhood. Break the cycle. Treat children decently, respectfully and they will willingly want to please in return. They will want to stand on the side of learning and authority. The wisdom of fair treatment, not beatdowns, make good learners and good citizens.
Sarah Parks
