STUDENTS of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Community College (SVGCC) have expressed mixed reactions with respect to their Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) results which were released by Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) on September 5, 2022.

According to a press release from the Ministry of Education, passing grades (Grades 1 to V) were obtained in 1659 subject sittings representing an overall pass rate of 87.78%.This represents a slight decrease compared to the 2021 results where the overall pass rate was 91.22%.

SEARCHLIGHT spoke about the results with a few students who will be graduating on September 28 and they had mixed reactions.

Daniel Jack said he is satisfied with his grades despite the challenges of his mother becoming ill while he was preparing for exams and eventually passing away.

Jack thought this would have negatively affected his performance, but he is thankful that he was able to pass all his exams. He said he believes his mom would have been proud of him if she were still alive.

Danielle Quashie also expressed satisfaction with her grades describing them as “fair”, and noted that she was very well prepared.

Her advice to future students is to thoroughly prepare because the examination body will not always bring questions they have encountered before.

Nineteen year old Lorenzo McMaster is another graduand who feels satisfied with his Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exam (CAPE) results.

He told SEARCHLIGHT this was his first time doing paper 2s (in 2020 & 2021 the exams done were paper 1s, or multiple choice). McMaster also had some advice for future students doing CAPE noting that they should take it upon themselves to do extra research, study hard and always ask for help when they may not understand something.

An eighteen year old female student said while she passed all her exams, she is disappointed with her grade. The student said she worked very hard and it broke her heart to see her results. She did not have kind works for the examination body remarking that they “…don’t show enough care about the candidates sitting the exams.” Her advice to future students is to ensure that all SBAs (School-based assessment) and exams are completed.

Another eighteen year old who studied Law, Sociology and Literatures in English at college described this year’s results as somewhat “shocking.”The student who has his eye set on pursuing law as a career, said he put in a lot more work this year than last year and his grades haven’t changed much.

He argued that students pay a lot of money to register for these examinations, therefore they should be be entitled to see where they fell off or were marked down.

Two other students said they felt both “good” and “disappointed” when they saw their results, because while they anticipated a certain grade for a particular subject/s they received that grade and even better, but there are other subjects in which they expected to do well but their final grade did not reflect this.