Proof and Refutation

The PM’s statement that “T&T is doing far better than all the other territories in the Caribbean at this time” (Tdad Guardian, July 11) is like saying that the PNM has more “moral and spiritual values” than any other party at this time. It is a seductive truth. Once again we seem caught in the Manning-Hart-Richards administration’s fantasy, a seemingly endless repetition of authoritative dream-statements and infantile wish-fulfillments without reference to actual evidence or room for refutation. While I do not have at my disposal access to the wealth of information and resources that the PM’s Office does (unlike the President’s presumably) I base my refutation of the PM’s statement on a single counter-example – the case of CSEC mathematics 2008. I choose mathematics as it is the area with which I am most familiar, the one perhaps most relevant to our leaders’ Desire to make T&T into a preferred destination for financial services and which (presumably) justifies our current developmental decisions and agenda.
The report on the performance of students of T&T on the 2008 CSEC Mathematics examination (available through the CXC website) is disaggregated from the rest of the region’s because of the compromised examination of last year. The results however are not atypical. It states on its first page that of the 20,000 or so T&T students writing the General Proficiency exam in mathematics last year, 47 percent of the candidates ‘passed’, i.e. achieved Grades I – III and 40 percent of the candidates scored at least half the available marks. This indeed is “far better” than the rest of the region where the overall pass rate is an abysmal 37 percent with only 28 percent scoring more than half of the marks. Far better is yet far from satisfactory. We ought not to congratulate ourselves so heartily on our measurable mediocrity. On the Paper 2, which requires students to demonstrate solutions not merely shade answers, only 33 percent of candidates in T&T scored at least half of the marks. The true scale of our underperformance is detailed in the litany of errors, mistakes and lack of mathematical understanding reported. On the very first question which assesses fundamental mathematical skills such as students’ ability to perform basic operations on mixed numbers, solve problems associated with income tax, calculate a percentage of a derived quantity and write as a percentage the ratio of two quantities, only 15 percent of students were able to get a full score, the most for any question on the paper, yet the overall mean score of which was less than half of the total. In fact only for 3 out of the 14 questions on the paper is the mean score more than half of the total available for the problem!
I am a little disappointed, the PM’s spin is usually “far better.”