Local Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) Registrar Magalie Celestine is encouraging registered candidates at Dominica’s private institutions to take School-Based Assessments, “a little more seriously.”
She encouraged students during her address at the release of the preliminary results of the CXC examinations held earlier this week, saying, “Candidates registered at our private institutions need to take SBAs a little more seriously.”
“CXC is encouraging group SBA to lessen the workload for both students and teachers,” she added. “Note that it is to students’ advantage to submit an incomplete version of the SBA instead of nothing at all.”
In the meantime, she pointed out that during the presentation of regional results in the Cayman Islands, CXC announced that from 2026 onwards, candidates will be allowed to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their SBAs.
“CXC has developed five standards that provide guidelines on the use of AI in SBAs that candidates must abide by,” she stated. “Those guidelines are to protect the candidates and to help students, parents, and teachers understand how to reference AI in the SBA.”
Meanwhile, Celestine shared that some secondary schools in Dominica had a 100 percent submission rate for 2025 SBAs.
“This means that all registered candidates at the Convent High School, the Dominica Community High School, the Wesley High School, the Pierre Charles Secondary, and the Orion Academy submitted an SBA to their teachers for all of their subjects,” she revealed.
Celestine noted that despite challenges experienced at Goodwill Secondary School, teachers managed to submit 85 percent of their SBAs.
She told teachers to continue to encourage students to develop their SBAs using Google Docs over the two-year period to prevent the loss of files on flash drives or crashed devices.
The Registrar stated that she looks forward to a 100 percent submission of SBAs at all schools in 2026.
These “SBAs” are a waste of time. Most of these kids just copy something from the internet or from a previous student. For most of these subjects there’s no way of verifying that the student actually did the work themselves. In many cases the teachers are doing most of the work (especially in private institutions) to bolster the passing grade of their students. CXC also has unclear guidelines for some important aspects of the SBA. And now they are gonna allow the use of AI? Pure madness
I agree with smh.
SBA’s could be a valuable contribution to the learning process, but as things stand they are open to abuse.
One aspect of the SBA for visual arts are questions that the student originates to ask in an interview with an artist of their choice. On one occasion three students from the same school came up with exactly the same questions in emailed questionnaires. The students were not familiar with my work, nor had they taken the trouble to meet me in person.
It was admitted that the teacher had prompted their list of questions. Hence, the exercise was a sham.
On the other hand, a student from a private institution familiarised herself with my work, visited my studio and asked some very relevant questions.