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| Top ranking students, Aaliyah Johnson (second left) and Rhiana Ruck (behind) are being hugged by fellow classmates from the St. Stephen’s Primary School for their top marks in the Common Entrance Exam today. (A.Miller/BGIS)?? |
Minister of Education and Human Resource Development, Ronald Jones, is generally satisfied with the overall results of students across the island.
He made this known today as he addressed the media, at the Elsie Payne Complex, on the performance of students in the 2012 Barbados Secondary Schools’ Entrance Examination (BSSEE).
He said: "I was looking for a slight improvement over last year. We had a very slight decline, even though there are some positives over last year."
??Some of those positives, he said, were seen in the mid band, where students received between 30 per cent and 69 per cent, and at the higher level where some tallied between 70 per cent and 100 per cent." Stating that this represented "reasonably good improvements", he expressed satisfaction with the results for the boys, noting that
they were also at the higher end of those first 100 students (48 per cent to 52 per cent) when in the two previous years, they were down substantially.
"There has been a step up, and this is positive for the country, where females would continue to perform, but males are also raising their performance. So, there are some positives," Mr. Jones added.
The Education Minister also revealed that there had also been a decline in those receiving under 30 per cent in the examination -18.2 per cent, where last year this was about 24 per cent. "So, that too is declining, while the other areas 30 per cent to 69 per cent and 70 per cent to100 per cent are improving, those are some positives," he reiterated
While stressing that there was a need for further improvement, Mr. Jones said: "I am a glutton for qualitative improvement; I am a glutton to see greater performances in our students; We will analyse each school to see its performance this year over the previous 10 years, for which we have those statistics [and] we will see if from last year they have improved."??
In this year’s examination, 30 students received 100 per cent in Mathematics. Nineteen of these were males, while 11 were females.?? Four students received full marks in the English section of the paper – two males and two females.
Three students topped the BSSEE exam with similar marks. They are Kai Alleyne of Wilkie Cumberbatch and Aaliyah Johnson and Rhiana Ruck of St. Stephen’s Primary. The trio received 246.63 and an ???A’ in Composition.
While Kai is set for Harrison College, Aaliyah and Rhiana are both off to Queen’s College in September.
Others in the top 10 are Kwame Connell of St. Gabriel’s Primary; Pretha Smith of Wesley Hall Junior; Kevon Worrell of Lawrence T. Gay; Christopher Phillips of the Rock Christian; Allysa Ashby of Wills Private School; Matthew Weatherhead of St. Paul’s Primary and Killian Campion of Will’s Private School.
The 11-Plus or Common Entrance Examination, as it is familiarly called, was taken by 3,970 students on May 8.