By Sue-Ann Wayow
SIX Hundred and ten more boys will sit the 2022 Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) on Thursday (March 31).
There will be 19,198 sitting broken up into 9,904 boys and 9,294 girls.
This was announced by Director of the Division of Educational Research and Evaluation Mervyn Sambucharan.
He was speaking at the Ministry of Education’s press conference on Monday that was held to update the public on the full reopening of school in term three of the academic year.
Sambucharan said that 18,212 children from Trinidad and 986 from Tobago will write the exam.
There were 486 concessions in Trinidad and four in Tobago.
He said that all preparations have been completed and on Tuesday, there will be a final walkthrough of the 552 examination centres across the country of the seven educational districts in Trinidad and Tobago as “one entity”.
The exam begins at 8.30 am across all centres and is expected to be completed in three hours and twenty minutes.
There was tremendous work being done in preparation for the exam which began since September 2021, he said.
Principal packages consisting of admission slips, student concession approvals were already distributed.
“Scripts for all the examination centres will be sent on the morning of the exam. Tobago has already received their complement and Trinidad has theirs already and packaging has been prepared for all our 552 centres,” Sambucharan said.
The centres will be managed by school supervisors.
Sambucharan said this year, approximately, 3,400 principals and teachers will be assisting with the examination process serving as centre managers, assessment supervisors and testers “ensuring that a standardised approach to the invigilation of the exercise goes smoothly.”
Packages for all assessment personnel have already been delivered containing the attendance registers, students’ labels, the forms and the approval for concession.
The director added that the environment would not be unfamiliar to examination pupils as they would have been introduced to it by their teachers and on Thursday all Covid-19 protocols would be especially enforced.
He also said the ministry will be working with the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) and the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) “to ensure there is no undue failure with those utilities.”
