Students get ready for March 17 SEA

THE Ministry of Education is making final preparations for this year’s Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) exams, scheduled for March 17 and students are going through a number of practice test papers as they get ready for the exams which have three components — creative writing, language arts and mathematics. Later this week, the ministry will confirm if more students are registered for the exams this year than the 29,912 students who wrote the exam on March 25 at 547 centres in 2004. The number of students who actually wrote last year’s exams was 20,814.

The exams lasted four and a half hours last year and Education Minister Hazel Manning was quoted as saying there were more available places than children writing the exams. She said there were 21,995 places in public and private secondary schools, of which 20,963 were available in Government and Government-assisted secondary schools. There were 1,032 places in private secondary schools, the Servol Junior Life Centre and in one pre-vocational school in Princes Town.

When the results were announced in July last year, 11,707 students were placed at five and seven-year schools, of which 6,043 were girls and 5,664 were boys. Eight hundred and eighty-one students were placed in private secondary schools, 260 at the Servol Life Centres, and 46 at the pre-vocational centre. The results showed that 2,422 or 11.7 percent scored 30 percent or less in subject areas, up from 2003 when 10.4 percent of the students’ who sat the SEA were identified as low achievers.