The much awaited MATSEC results, which due to COVID-19 are following a Predicted Level assessment, are being released today via SMS and post.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic which saw schools closing during the month of March till the end of the semester, the MATSEC board has had to rethink the method of assessment for the annual MATSEC exams.
In turn, the MATSEC Examination board had to suspend a number of May examinations due to social distancing precautionary measures which would not allow for large groups of students to be gathered in an examination room.
Since March, the MATSEC Examinations Board has been working with the Ministry of Education and State, Church and Independent schools to provide a SEC level to students whose exams were cancelled this May. The product of these discussions was an exercise that allowed it to award a Predicted Level, based on Mock exam results, to each student who registered for the May exam session.
Mock examinations were adopted for this exercise because they are generally modelled to SEC exams and a comparison was possible.
“Our priority has been to safeguard students’ progression to the next stages in their studies,” MASTEC Chairperson Odette Vassallo said during a press conference on Tuesday, in which the board delineated how the Predicted Level exercise took place.
The process by which the level was established was rigorous and robust and intended to predict fairly as possible the level a student would have attained had they sat for the SEC exams in May. Thus, the board ensured that the distribution of levels follows as similar pattern to that in other years, so that this year’s students are not disadvantaged.
MATSEC asked State, Curch and Independent schools to submit their Mock exam papers, marks obtained by each student for each subject, and a sample of marked scripts (20%).
With this information, the calibration exercise conducted by subject experts and historical dataset from past SEC examinations on individual schools, MATSEC was able to standardise levels across schools.
MATSEC Director Dario Pirotta explained that this method ensured that as far as possible results are fair, and students are not advantaged or disadvantaged because of schools’ harsher of more generous marking. Notably, this standardisation means that the SEC level awarded could be different from the level obtained in the Secondary School Certificate and Profile issued by MEDE.
To show how fair the Predicted Level exercise is, Pirotta used the overall average of the results for English examinations from last year and compared them with this year’s; 66.1% in 2019 and 66.5% in 2020.
In total, Pirotta estimated that around 4,000 school registered students were affected by this new method, excluding private candidates who registered for the SEC May session. These private candidates have been asked to register and sit for SEC exams in September 2020 and will not be receiving a result like school registered students seeing that they did not have Mock exams.
Pirotta explained that this year’s results take the form of ‘Level 3, Level 2 or Not Awarded’ instead of the usual ‘Grades 1-7 or U’. However, he emphasised that the SEC qualification will be indistinguishable from those obtained in previous years.
Students who are not satisfied with the Predicted Level results have the option of sitting for the September examinations and get a Grade result. Registrations for the SEC examination will open on 17 July 2020.
The MATSEC Examination Board added that if there are students who have any queries on this exercise, they should first contact their respective school before contacting the board directly.