The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) is calling for more vigilance among teachers and department heads as it continues to battle irregularities, lack of compliance and plagiarism in some School-Based Assessments (SBA), involving both educators and students.
Assistant Registrar in Examinations, Administration and Security Diane Medford made the revelation today during a presentation to a delegation of Dutch Caribbean representatives.
“Unfortunately, we have had evidence and cases of fraud with teachers,” she said, although not identifying any particular country or school where the practice occurred.
“That is something that really concerns us, where the teachers perpetrate the fraud in the SBA. We have had at least one case where the teacher told the candidates ‘you don’t need to do any work we will take care of it’. But of course we know. Because of our systems we were able to discover that. We may not discover all, but the point is that we want to know that teachers in our system have some sort of integrity in terms of dealing with SBAs.”
In relation to plagiarism, Medford said some candidates copied information from the Internet “wholesale”.
But she said the Barbados-based CXC would be moving to police that better.
“We are moving to online SBAs from 2016. We are not going to move all the subjects at the same time. We are going to be phasing that [in] and one of the things that gives us the ability to do is to use plagiarism software so that we can identify those things. But teachers are also asked to pay attention to those things,” Medford said.
The CXC official also disclosed that the council was finding evidence of collusion in SBAs.
“Sometimes you will find that there are candidates who deliberately copy other candidates’ work, or there are candidates who copy other candidates’ work without the candidates’ knowledge,” Medford said.
“But what bothers us sometimes, especially last year, we have had statements from teachers and the teachers would say ‘well, we corrected both of them and we didn’t realize the similarities’. So we are saying those are things you need to be vigilant of.”