The Education Officer responsible for Measurements and Evaluation within the Ministry of Education is hoping for an improvement in the results of this year's Common Entrance and Junior Secondary examinations, when compared to previous years.

Mrs. Patricia Collins was at the time giving an update on preparations for both examinations.

Asked about her expectations this time around, she said: "I'm hoping we'll see some sort of improvement in the overall passes this year, and I think come next year, having done the grade four assessment in November of 2007 with the students of grade five, we think that with them being in grade six come September, we should have better results."

One of the major findings of last year's assessment was that some students were experiencing great difficulties reading, but Collins is optimistic that since the problem has been identified, key players are working out corrective measures to deal with the situation.

"Teachers and Principals are aware that some of the students have a serious reading problem, and I think principals and zone officers are making an attempt to remedy the situation, and we're just hoping for the best because we can only get better from hereon."

Seventeen hundred and sixty-eight (1768) students will write the Common Entrance examination on June 4-5 in the four core areas: language arts, mathematics, social studies and science.

Of that student number, eight hundred and seventy-seven (877) are girls and eight hundred and ninety-nine (899) are boys. They are from thirty (30) government primary and twenty-eight (28) private primary schools.

On June 10-12, three hundred and seventy-eight (378) students, two hundred and ten (210) males and one hundred and sixty-eight (168) females will write the Junior Secondary examination, and will be tested in mathmatics, social studies, science, language arts and health and family life education.

Preparation has been hectic according to Mrs. Collins, but she says they are on target, and will be ready to begin Common Entrance next week.

One new addition to both examinations this year is that students will be required to use answer sheets when working out multiple-choice questions. In the past, answers were circled on question papers.

The introduction of answer sheets will speedup the marking of papers. It is also in preparation for the introduction of the optical mark reader, which when programmed, will mark papers in record time.

Results for both Common Entrance and Post Primary examinations will be available by the end of July.