The release of 2026 preliminary results from the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) has sparked renewed calls from two prominent regional education advocates for sweeping changes to exam reporting, systemic transparency, and national investigations into student well-being across the Caribbean. While thousands of candidates across the bloc have marked academic achievements across four major CXC qualification frameworks – the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ), and Caribbean Regional Certificate of Secondary Competence (CCSLC) – advocates argue that the official published aggregate statistics hide deep, long-running systemic flaws that demand immediate, targeted scrutiny.
Official published metrics put the 2026 regional pass rate for CSEC at 72.18%, with CAPE posting an even higher 93.5% pass rate, under CXC’s current grading system that designates Grades 1 through 5 as passing outcomes. But Paula-Anne Moore, a parent advocate who serves as spokesperson for both Barbados’ Group of Concerned Parents and the regional Caribbean Coalition for Exam Redress, has raised urgent questions about the real-world utility of these broad, aggregated passing bands, especially for students seeking employment or admission to competitive higher education institutions.
Moore pointed out that while CXC classes Grades 1 to 5 as acceptable passing outcomes for CAPE, few competitive employers or reputable tertiary institutions would consider a Grade 4 or 5 acceptable in today’s crowded academic and job markets. Even a Grade 3, she noted, falls short of entry requirements for many leading universities. To bring regional exam reporting into line with global best practices – such as the United Kingdom’s Cambridge A-Level system, which publishes granular breakdowns of top A and A* grades – Moore has called on CXC and all Caribbean national education ministries to publish disaggregated data on the share of candidates attaining Grade 1, the highest performance level, for both CAPE and CSEC. She also highlighted the complete absence of public data on another critical matriculation benchmark: the share of students passing five CSEC subjects, including core Mathematics and English A, a requirement for entry to most post-secondary programs across the region. While Moore acknowledged that CSEC Mathematics pass rates have risen to 42% this cycle, she warned that aggregated statistical reporting is often used to frame incremental gains as major successes, rather than encouraging full transparency that would reveal ongoing gaps in performance.
Dr Zhanè Bridgeman-Maxwell, a science educator and the second advocate involved in the call for reform, offered context for the stark performance gap between CAPE and CSEC pass rates, noting that the structure of post-secondary study shapes student outcomes intrinsically. Unlike CSEC, which is a compulsory secondary-leaving qualification for most students, CAPE is undertaken by students who have already chosen to pursue sixth-form study in specialized, career-focused academic disciplines. “When you are intrinsically motivated, and you’re choosing something that you like, students tend to be more engaged,” she explained, noting that high CAPE pass rates do reflect that students who reach this stage of study are generally thriving. The gap, she argued, lies in the large share of regional students who never progress past CSEC before seeking post-secondary opportunities. While some leading regional institutions, such as the University of the West Indies, offer preliminary bridging programs to help these students close preparation gaps, the achievement gap remains a major barrier to upward mobility for thousands of young Caribbean people each year.
Beyond academic performance outcomes, both advocates raised alarms about two underreported trends revealed in the 2026 results data: candidate absenteeism and widespread examination irregularities. CXC’s official data records more than 35,000 candidate no-shows for the 2026 exams, alongside 128 confirmed cases of exam malpractice, most linked to unauthorized use of smart devices, candidate collusion, and the emerging threat of generative AI-facilitated cheating. Dr Bridgeman-Maxwell framed both absenteeism and cheating as interconnected coping mechanisms for students navigating a high-stakes testing system that places extreme pressure on young people. “At the end of the day, any source of irregularity in an exam and absenteeism are two sides of the same coin. What is common between the two is that candidates are finding a way of coping with facing a high-stakes test, whether that means not showing up or attempting unauthorised means to sit the exam,” she observed. She called on regional governments, tertiary institutions, and social service providers to conduct localized, in-depth studies to address rising academic anxiety, widespread student disengagement, and a growing gender gap that has seen increasing rates of male attrition from secondary education across the region. She also warned that unregulated generative AI use poses a growing threat to the development of critical thinking skills among students, and that cheating enabled by AI is likely to rise significantly without targeted, structured classroom interventions to help students use AI ethically.
Moore went further, sharply criticizing CXC for its pattern of shifting blame for systemic exam challenges onto students and teachers, while refusing to acknowledge its own institutional missteps. She pointed to the January 2026 hybrid e-testing pilot for English A and Mathematics, which saw widespread disruption across Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, with widespread technical failures, multi-hour delays, and inadequate paper backup plans that left thousands of students in severe distress. “Thousands of students were traumatised by these exams. They were inadequately piloted, no mock exams or basic preparation was provided, and exams were delayed by three to seven hours in a morass of confusion,” Moore said. “Yet CXC claimed no student was disadvantaged and delays were minimal. This callous, dismissive communication destroys trust and confidence in the system year after year.” She added that long-running unaddressed issues, including repeated exam paper errors, duplicated multiple-choice questions, and the failure to implement key recommendations from the 2020 Independent Review Team of CXC, continue to erode the credibility of regional qualifications among employers and universities globally.
The conversation also touched on CXC’s newly piloted Caribbean Technical and Vocational Education Certification (CTEC), a modular assessment framework designed to reduce student cognitive stress by splitting cumulative exams into smaller, sequential units. CXC has hailed the pilot’s early results, reporting an 80 to 90% pass rate for CTEC Mathematics Module 1 and framing the outcome as proof that modular assessment improves student knowledge retention and reduces exam-related anxiety. While Dr Bridgeman-Maxwell welcomed the exploration of alternative assessment pathways as a positive step, she cautioned against premature celebration of the pilot based solely on entry-level module results. “Module 1 covers foundational entry level concepts. High pass rates there do not necessarily map onto students performing well in higher-order mathematical mastery required in module 2 and module 3,” she noted, raising a core policy question: “does modularisation build genuine competence in students, or does it simply certify basic skills for better reporting metrics of CXC?”
Both advocates agreed that while new structural initiatives like CTEC hold potential for improving student experiences, modular assessment tools cannot replace the core foundations of strong classroom learning, robust diagnostic teaching, and full institutional accountability across the entire Caribbean Community (CARICOM) education ecosystem. Until CXC addresses long-standing transparency gaps, institutional failures, and unaddressed systemic barriers to student success, they argue, regional qualifications will continue to fall short of meeting the needs of Caribbean young people.
