Dear Editor,
We are now on day 3 of FBE exams for our group 8 students. The students are complaining that they were given the exams that was meant for the group 8 of last year. They just covered the 2020 with a sticker and changed the 0 into a 1.
The general knowledge exams that was given on Monday had absolutely nothing to do with St. Maarten or any recent events. It was about events that took place in 2018/2019.
Today’s math exams was overall very difficult for the majority of the students after speaking to parents from different schools the opinion was the same. Children were given 30 very long problem solving to do in 45 minutes.
In my humble opinion these students from group 8 should not have to sit this FBE.
My reasons are as follows:
They were out almost the entire group 7 school year because of the COVID-19.
Many were at home some with devices and some without and at times without internet. Also some were at home unsupervised, while parents had no choice because they had to go to work, thus unable to help or assist their child.
They usually get 6 hours a day in school, while they were only getting 1-2 hours on Zoom a day. Group 7 is the most important year as group 8 is just a repeat of group 7. But if they didn’t get any proper lessons in group 7 how can they be expected to or even required to do these exams.
The students from group 8 of 2020 would have been much more prepared to do the exams last year than these students of this year because they had all of the necessary preparations in 2018/2019 and school closed in March of 2020.
As parents we need to come together and contest these exams.
The children should be placed based on their educational reports and not on the FBE exams, or they will have to lower the scores. It’s definitely not fair to our children.
Furthermore, I believe that new exams should have been prepared for the children based on the current situation/ circumstances. By giving them the 2020 exams a great injustice have been done to our children.
A group of concerned parents
