Senior Education Officers of the Ministry of Education are currently looking into the Mathematics results for the 2019 Year 13 external examination.

Minister Rosy Akbar said those were provisional results and they had seen a drop in the Math’s results.

“We’ve done an analysis on the Math’s paper and we’ve also looked at the difficulty level of things,” she said.

However, she would not comment any further as they await the confirmed result, which normally comes a month after the provisional results were released.

She said the drop in results may affect the intake of students for TELS and National Toppers and she had been informed by the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Alison Burchell, that they were currently liaising with the tertiary institution to see how best they could accommodate the students who had not made the cutoff mark.

Ms Akbar also said there was a change in the Maths curriculum a year or two ago and that could also be another factor for the drop in the results.

“But that shouldn’t be the case because teachers were made aware of the changes and normally it’s communicated down to the children,” the minister said.

“All in all, Math’s is an issue for us, but we still encourage students to continue pursuing or have an interest in Maths because it is a major component for many career choices that children would want to pursue.

The ministry is also looking for schools that are currently overstaffed, short of Math’s teachers, and schools that have more teachers would be removed so they would be distributed equally.

Edited by Naisa Koroi

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