This Program will be twofold:
1.The New Caribbean Certificate of Secondary Level Competence (CCSLC).
2.CSEC Examination
The CCSLC program will start in Form One and will be examinable when students have acquired the requisite skills at the end of Form two or Three. Opportunities for students in other forms will be done when the faculty recognizes the need for it.
The Core Subjects at CCSLC are: English, Mathematics, Social Studies, Integrated Science, and Spanish.
The programme for the award of the Certificate of Secondary Level Competence allows for candidates to take subject areas that are developed, examined and certified locally.
Criteria for the inclusion of these subjects to be included in the transcript are listed below.
Management and Quality Assurance
All documents detailing the subject area, its standards, tasks, scoring details and the operational arrangements for the delivery of the subject area must be submitted.
The management and assessment of these programmes will be done locally; however, CXC reserves the right to request samples of standards, tasks, scoring rubrics and students’ work for quality assurance purposes.
Expected outcomes
The expected outcomes of each student should be stated explicitly.
Requirements
Assessment of a subject is based on a product that may be a piece of written work, or drawings, models with explanatory text, or photographs with labels, or audio or video recordings with transcripts or other artifacts. The product should combine two or more of the modes of presentation identified above. In addition to the time spent acquiring the desired key skills, attitudes and behaviors related to each elective, the entire assessment component should require a minimum of 36 hours.
The product is based on tasks undertaken by the students under the guidance of a teacher or a ‘mentor’ recognized by the school.
Students may submit ‘hand-made’ products (that is, handwritten text, hand-drawn sketches and illustrations or hand-made models) or may use technology to produce, illustrate or enhance their submissions. Submissions should, however, exclude samples of dangerous and illegal materials and should conform to accepted good practice for handling potentially harmful substances.
Management
The student should spend at least 36 hours during a school year engaged in activity associated with the assessment.
The allocation of 36 hours provides time for
(a)teachers to explain to students the nature and scope of the tasks required to be undertaken by each student;
(b)discussions between teachers (or mentor) and students on various aspects of the subject area and tasks; and
(c)students to undertake related tasks including making notes or diary accounts, collecting and evaluation of data, and constructing artifacts.
Time spent in class may be used for oral or visual or psychomotor presentations by individual students on certain aspects of their assignments.
Length of written tasks
In cases where the product is primarily a piece of written work, it should be presented in about 1500 words of text, excluding diagrams, graphs, photographs and newspaper or magazine clippings. The demand of the tasks identified and the quality of the analysis and presentation are more critical than the number of words written.
Guidance
Students should be aware that work they present for assessment of the subject area should be their own. Any material, for example, tables, photographs and diagrams reproduced from other sources and material and information downloaded from the Internet must be properly acknowledged.
Students are expected to consult their teachers, their mentors, their parents and their peers and any other accessible resource persons or critics as they work on the tasks.
Students should be encouraged to clearly state the source of any information or opinions or ideas, and to agree or disagree with these.
Assessment
The assessment strategies used for this component should
(a)enable each student to continually assess the quality of his/her own work, and to reflect on what he/she is learning and how he/she is learning;
(b)enable each student to gain new insights as contained in the objectives of the given component;
(c)be criterion-referenced in that each student is aware of the assessment criteria to be used for the component;
(d)be formative in that the process of assessment should provide timely feedback which the student uses to modify, extend and enhance the written, visual or psychomotor tasks;
(e)enable each student to use any learning method within his/her comfort zone and be confident in its potential to develop excellence;
(f)take into account the student’s motivational orientations, psychological needs, and present educational skills.
Note:
Many of the areas under this component may require a non-classroom element conducted by a ‘mentor’, and involve a flexible approach to teaching and learning. Some significant features of this approach are:
(i)Strong support for student activities should be available
(ii)More resources are needed for non-classroom elements
(iii)Students are expected to work outside their usual comfort zone (of being under their own teacher control)
(iv)A variety of teaching and learning and assessment methods is appropriate and should be encouraged.
Information required for CXC Records
In order for these subjects to be eligible or use towards the CCSLC, a candidate must achieve at least competence/a pass in the subject. At the time of application for the award of the CCSLC, the school/centre must inform CXC of the subject area(s) that each student has satisfactorily completed and their levels of achievement
This will be the main focus of the curriculum from Form 3 to 5. Students leaving BAVO will either proceed, following testing, to the CXC/CSEC Stream or to the Secondary Vocational Education Programme (VSBO). This will be determined by:
1)Test results at end of Year 2 of BAVO;
2)BAVO progress reports; and
3)Discussion of students’ potential by teachers, counsellor, and Director.
CXC/CSEC subjects usually require three years to adequately cover the syllabuses and complete the School Based Assessments. Typically, School-Based Assessment skills for each subject are developed in Form 3. Actual work on School Based Assessments should commence in Form 4 and are usually completed in the second term of Form 5. In Form 5, students will take subjects at either CSEC General Proficiency or Technical Proficiency.
Final examinations at the end of Form 5 are taken with the following examination boards:
CXC Caribbean Examination Council
IGCSE International General Certificate of Secondary Education (Dutch)
