TT LAUNCHES cape

Thursday’s launch of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE), which will replace the Cambridge Ceneral Certificate of Education (GCE) Advanced Level examinations in Government and Government assisted secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, marks the approaching end of an official association with Cambridge University, which began in the 1860s.

The first CAPE examination, on which successful students will qualify for University entry, will take place next year, 32 years after Caribbean Governments introduced the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) Ordinary Level examinations. And in the same way it took the Governments ten years of planning to launch the CXC ‘O’ Level examinations, which officially replaced the Cambridge ‘O’ Level examination in 1972, it has taken Trinidad and Tobago seven years after CAPE was introduced to do this. Caribbean Governments were careful to determine that CAPE was of comparable standard with that of Cambridge University’s or Oxford University’s ‘A’ Level examinations, and satisfied entrance requirements to other United Kingdom, United States and other relevant universities.

CAPE is another example, like that of the CXC ‘O’ Level examinations, of co-operative education in the Caribbean, in the same manner that the Caribbean Community represents an approach, however convoluted, at co-operative social and development planning. The respective Governments, however, understood that it was not enough to abandon the Cambridge University Advanced Level examinations without setting high standards for its own examinations, which would be acceptable both internationally and regionally. And in much the same manner that the best regional minds had been brought together to carefully develop and establish the CXC ‘O’ Level product, the same procedure had been adopted with respect to the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations. While the emphasis has been on change, and particularly the setting of examinations more suited to the Region’s needs, the end result, using the accepted quality of the CXC ‘O’ Level Examinations, as an example, has not been change merely for change’s sake.

CAPE represents another meaningful break with the Region’s colonial past, whose first tentative steps were the setting up of the Montego Bay Conference in 1947, the establishment of the University College of the West Indies in 1948, the aborted West Indies Federation of 1958, the creation of the Caribbean Free Trade Area in 1968, and its evolving to the Caribbean Community in 1973. University entrance examination requirements have undergone several changes in Trinidad and Tobago since scholarships and entry to university were first based on the Senior Cambridge examinations. In 1915 there was a shift to the results of the Higher Certificate Examination. Yet another shift in entry requirements, this time to the Cambridge Advanced Level General Certificate of Education, was made in 1964. The leading up to CAPE would begin with the Caribbean Examinations Council Ordinary Level Examinations of 1972.