Five years ago, stressed-out parents, teachers and education officials gave a collective sigh of relief and cheered lustily when the Government scrapped the Common Entrance Examination (CEE) for the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), believing it would eliminate a host of ills, notably the mind-bending pressure on students sitting the CEE.

But as the sixth sitting of the GSAT looms – March 25-26, 2004 – the customary exam pressure is on in earnest, and there is little difference between the old and the new, parents say. Children are showing the usual signs of stress, such as irritability, nervousness, depression and headaches, they say.

“It’s the same thing as the CEE,” says Adrian Mandra, dean of studies at Wolmer’s Prep School. “It’s the same creaming off, and all you have done is add another three subjects (to the GSAT curriculum) to stress the children out,” he accuses in an interview with the Sunday Observer.

One Kingston businesswoman, who doesn’t want to be named, says her 11 year-old son, who is in Grade Six at the Catholic-run Stella Maris Preparatory, one of the capital’s top prep schools, is under extreme pressure as the exam nears.

“Last night, he told me he wanted to bang his head on the wall. He can’t take it anymore,” she says.

The boy, one of the estimated hundreds of GSAT candidates who react in this way to the exam pressure, recently started having migraine headaches and suffers every night from complications, such as swollen temples and neck glands brought on by bronchitis, according to his mother. Emotional problems started surfacing several weeks ago, and this prompted her to consult a child psychiatrist.

“Nobody must fail in that school,” the mother remarks angrily. “They put them (to sit) in different averages, like 90s sit here, 80s sit here, 70s sit there and then the 90s criticise the 70s and the 60s which my son is in. They (classmates) tell them they are dunce and they are going to gunman school.”

The school dismisses much of her accusations. The grouping based on scores was an experiment that ended over two years ago, admits Stella Maris’ Grade Six co-ordinator, Lois Baker. “It happened in the past but it was stopped because it does create a stigma.”

She is not surprised at the accusations, however. They come in many forms as the school accelerates its preparation of students for the exam, which takes place in less than three weeks. “Sometimes we look at it (accusation) seriously, sometimes we dismiss it.”

Like many parents anxious to give their children the best chance of getting a place through the GSAT and a ticket to a better life, the worried mother says she is paying $57,000 a term in extra-lesson fees at Stella Maris and two other private schools for the boy. That has increased the pressure considerably on her son. Each school gives its own set of assignments and when combined, they add another 20 class hours to his 40-hour school week.

Nights find him between 7:00 and 9:30 doing battle with five different test book assignments and hundreds of questions to complete.

The blame for putting the children under so much pressure is quickly passed on at the different levels of the system.

“The pressure comes from the public,” explains Freda Jones, the registrar for Independent Schools in the education ministry. “Invariably people call me to ask me about the best prep schools. They are asking me how were their (the school’s) GSAT results? How many students did they have going to the traditional (high) schools? Because if they don’t get their children to go to the traditional schools they don’t see them as performing,” Jones discloses.

But the ministry also blames the schools: “We still find where people (teachers) are even going to the extent of trying to acquire past papers and using that. We have got to get them to realise that if they teach the curriculum as it is set out, there is no need for all of this pressure that is on the children,” adds Jones.

“Schools also suffer,” counters president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, Wentworth Gabbidon. “The schools are reacting to the needs and expectations of the parents and the wider community,” he insists.

Many parents, too, are under stress, insists Michelle Dauphin-Beckford, a consultant paediatrician at Management and Paediatric Services Limited in Kingston, and mother of a daughter who is preparing for the exam this year.

Dauphin-Beckford says she has seen and offered comforting words to a number of exam-worried parents. “I am worried too,” she admits. “You just don’t know what the outcome of the exam will be.”

Sentiments like those are what the GSAT was supposed to eliminate when it replaced the Common Entrance Examination.

Under the intensely selective CEE, Government placed and published the names of only the top 14,000 or so students, because there were never enough places in the traditional high schools. The other 26,000 were placed into whatever all-age, secondary or technical schools would take them, or they would drop out of school.

Most of these schools have recently been upgraded to high school status, and the ministry is doing all the placement, based on scores and choice of schools.

But Wolmer’s Mandra says little has changed. The fear that existed in some students under CEE which manifested in constant anxiety, depression, headaches, nightmares, psychotic behaviour and even suicide, still remains, he adds.

“When you look at the Social Studies syllabus you want to go mad,” Mandra says. “Science and Social Studies are Grade seven work!”

But both Mandra and Baker agree that the demands of the GSAT curricula and exam make applying the pressure in school absolutely necessary.

“Our workload is heavy, from Grade One (and) we make no apology for it,” Mandra says. “If you want a good crop of students you have to work at it.”

Baker says: “It is not unusual to give them a test consisting of 80 questions. In the exam they get 80 questions to do in one-and-a-quarter hours. We are building speed.”

But Mandra admits that he goes a little further by teaching study skills from very early, along with other methods to help the students assimilate the work. Closer to the exam time, lessons are accelerated or decelerated depending on the level of students.

Some believe the real solution to the GSAT pressure will come when the ministry addresses the problem of limited space in the few high schools most students and their parents seem to prefer, or revise its method of screening and distributing students.

This method is still the same as under the CEE, outgoing Chief Education Officer Wesley Barrett confirms.

As in all previous exams, the next GSAT will see most of the students placed electronically, based on their scores and their choice of schools.

“Those (students) with the highest scores will get their first choice, relative to the number of spaces,” Barrett says.

Last year, of the 48,000 students who sat the GSAT, the traditional high schools received 14,158 students, all of whose averages in all four subjects were upwards of 73 per cent; technical schools got the second top set of students – some 1,653 – whose averages were between 61 per cent and 73 per cent; reclassified schools were next in line with 21,523 students, all averaging 51 per cent and over in the four subjects.

Junior high schools received 7,879 students whose averages were 33 per cent and above and all-age schools took the remaining students, some 2,788, who achieved less than 31 per cent in all subject areas.

Invariably, there is between five and ten per cent who cannot be placed this way, Barrett says. Then “you need some advice from the regions. They (ministry staff from the six regional offices) come in and make an input.”

The entire process is watched over by a committee of persons from the church and the Jamaica Teachers’ Association.

The ministry has been seeking solutions. In the five years of the GSAT, they increased the number of high school choices, which students note when registering for the exam, from two to four. But many still choose the same schools.

“Each parish has at least one school where the children gravitate towards,” says Branford Gayle, Manchester High School principal and president of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools.

In Kingston it is Campion College, Immaculate Conception High, Ardenne High and Wolmer’s Girls. In St Elizabeth it’s Hampton and Munro. In St James it’s Cornwall College and Montego Bay High. In Clarendon “everybody wants to go to Glenmuir High”. In Manchester, the preferences are Bishop Gibson High School for Girls and Manchester High.

“I get about 150 requests from all over the parish for transfers,” Gayle says. These requests are made by parents whose students were placed in a reclassified school.

“I think basically they feel their children will stand a better chance of doing well in five years’ time. It is a perception one doesn’t erase so quickly,” he says.

Despite recent efforts by the ministry to allocate more resources to the reclassified high and technical high schools, they still remain at a disadvantage. They do not attract the calibre teachers that a traditional high school is likely to draw.

They cannot afford to offer some of the programmes and extra-curricular offered by the traditional high schools, and in many cases, lack some of the basic amenities, like science labs.

They struggle more to pay bills because many of the students that attend are from the low-income category, and their school fee payment compliance rate is lower than what obtains in the traditional high schools, Gayle says.