By Glenda Anderson, Staff ReporterOMINOUS RAIN clouds and intermittent drizzle did nothing to dampen the excitement that attended day one of the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) exercise held in schools across the island.
In what some principals have described as a day of 'smooth sailing', and 'fairly uneventful', nearly 49,000 primary level students wrote papers in mathematics and social studies in two 75-minute sessions. The exams continue today.
At St. Aloysius Primary in Kingston, 202 students in two centres were deep in concentration when The Gleaner team visited, their little fists tightly curled around lead pencils; many faces were calm.
"It's been going quite smoothly and we are satisfied with the exams. The students seemed to be at ease with the examiners and they appeared focused," said Pauline Stephenson, principal of the institution.
At St. Richard's Primary School on Mannings Hill Road, St. Andrew, principal Vera Buckley also reported an uneventful day with 148 students registered to sit the exams.
MINOR PROBLEMS
Still, the day was not without hitches as both representatives of the Ministry of Education and Jamaica Teachers' Association president Wentworth Gabbidon said there had been instances where unregistered students had attended the centres.
"We got a few calls but when we checked their names, they were not on our registers at all. As far as we know any student who was registered would have been on the presiding officer's list," said Sephlin Myers-Thomas, director of the ministry's Student Assessment Unit. She was unable to give figures as to the exact number of unregistered students. She explained that there were still options open to those students.
"It depends on what year they were born. If it is between 1992 and 1995, they may sit the test next year. If it is that they were inadvertently not registered by the school then it is the responsibility of the school to help in placing the student."
