A male student who placed within the ‘top 10’ of the highly competitive Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment (CPEA) examinations, had set a goal to overtake the score his mother had gotten years before him.

At the beginning of this school year Jael Forbes decided to aim for the top spots in the 2022 exams.

“I wanted to get into the first 100 at least and when my mother did her CPEA examinations she came within the top ten so I wanted to beat her, and that I did,” the young man said, delivering his joke calmly while sitting next to his mother, Jennifer Forbes on Wednesday, June 22.

Questioned on his mother’s reaction to his results, he quipped to laughter, “I assumed that she would have felt happy for me but then still disappointed within herself.”

When his mother was asked how she felt upon hearing that her son placed fifth for boys and tenth overall, she revealed “I’m happy, but I’m more so happy for him because he reminded me that he had said he’s coming in the top ten and he really, really worked hard for it.”

“Two years ago, actually, when he first understood what CPEA was, his first question to me was ‘What was your position?’, and I told him and he just said ‘well okay well I’m going to beat you’, and he did well,” she said, adding that she was just happy that he achieved what he set out to achieve.

While Jael attended the St Mary’s Roman Catholic School his mother was a student at the Sion Hill Government School.

She revealed, when asked, that she placed eighth overall and fourth for girls in her exams, but her son who was listening clarified (to laughter) that he had beaten her in percentage.

Jael accumulated 472 out of 500 marks, with his highest examination grade being for Mathematics, scoring 70 marks out of 75.

In order to achieve these results, the student doubled down on his studying.

“When I came home I would study. I would take breaks between studying. My mother would help me prepare, she also signed me up for CPEA preparation lessons with Fitz Academy,” he explained.

The young man also explained, “I would try my best to identify weak spots that I had in certain topics and subjects and apply more concentration towards them.”

He was able to identify that his area of concern would be the comprehension section of the Language Arts exam and the hurdle he encountered was indeed this.

“I had to read over the passage more than three times because initially, I thought I would need to read it three times,” he disclosed, and he had to really think about the answers.

On the other hand, Jael likes Mathematics.

“For Math I think that once you know the procedure and how to work out the problem given it would just be easy to find the answer…And there can be multiple procedures to work out the problem,” he reasoned.

That having been said, he does not currently have a set plan for his future career.

The accomplished Taekwondo athlete who hung up his black belt, and also put away his soccer ball in preparation to sit the exams, can now get back to recreation and celebration with a planned vacation abroad.

Jael noted that he got the result he wanted and “I would just like to thank my mother, my teachers and Fitz Academy for helping me prepare.”