Today over six thousand Standard 6 students from around the country sat the first part of the PSE. The exam, which tests the students' academic progress throughout primary school, has seen a downward trend in results with about half of the students who participated last year earning a D in the English section. We spoke to the Minister of Education, Patrick Faber, about it his expectations for this year's exam...
Hon. Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
"Well it is always a very exciting day. I look as people posted on facebook all the happiness that their children are at this point and it's quite a milestone if you've gone through all the stages of primary school and you are at this point now. A lot of preparation as gone in. We try to remind people that it's not only preparation that comes in standard 6. In fact this is the culmination of the primary school journey and so what they do in these exams should be a reflection of what they learnt over the entire 8 or 9 years that they spent in primary school."
"As people are aware, the results over the last - more than a decade had not been what we want them to be at all and we keep on working at that, particularly as it relates to math. Math continues to be a major challenge and the ministry some year ago initiated measures that would see eventually some movement in terms of the math grades. We are hoping that this year will be a bit different in that those results will reflect positively the kind of interventions that we have put in place and we are hoping that our students will perform well overall. Of course there are factors that we hope, we know exists and we are hoping those factors will be minimal and that includes of course the 11 days of strike that occurred in this school year. We are hoping that the children were able to put that away basically and that they were able to focus. We are hoping that parents as well as teachers were able to work with the standard 6 students to make sure that that number of days lost would not affect them in a tremendous way in these exams today and when they take the second part."
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