500 PEP Students Receive Special Accommodations

The Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information is reporting that special accommodations were provided for 500 students who sat the Grade Six Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations earlier this year.

This was disclosed by Deputy Chief Education Officer in the Ministry’s Examinations and Assessment Administration Services Branch, Maryah Ho-Young.

She was speaking during a special briefing held on Monday (September 14) at the Ministry’s Caenwood Centre Complex in Kingston.

Special accommodations are support measures provided for students who have been identified as having special needs and/or learning challenges, as outlined in a psychoeducational evaluation report.

Ms. Ho-Young explained that built into the PEP assessment framework “is the fact that we must cater to students with special educational needs”.

“It is well documented… the variety of needs. A standard part of the assessment process involves meetings and reviews by the Special Education Unit. So we work very closely with them in the development of the assessment,” she stated.

“In terms of accommodations that are actually granted for students who sit the primary exit profile, examination papers are printed in braille. We also provide examination papers using tactile diagrams. Students are assigned readers, writers, prompters, they are given extra time, they are given breaks. We also give students accommodation of providing them with a linguistic aid for those students whose first language is not English language. So that’s a standard practice,” she added.

In response to the disruption to teaching and learning caused by Hurricane Melissa, the Ministry modified the administration of the 2026 PEP examinations.

Ms. Ho-Young explained that the decision was taken not to administer the Science and Social Studies components of the examination.

Instead, students sat Mathematics, Language Arts and the Ability Test, while the Performance Task was also not administered.

“In addition, we administered, for the first time, literacy and numeracy assessments so that we could track students’ progression in these foundational skill areas over time. So, students, this year for grade-six PEP, actually sat 50 per cent more items than the students previously. As a Ministry though, we did observations, we did walk-throughs… just to see how students were doing during the administration,” she stated.

“The reports came back positive. The students were able to complete the assessments during the time that was given to them. Now while we made these changes to the assessment, the question has come up – are we able to compare students’ performance in Mathematics and Language Arts year-on-year? The simple answer to that is yes,” the Deputy Chief Education Officer added.

Ms. Ho-Young said several procedures are in place to allow the Ministry to make that comparison.

“What we assess did not change from the perspective of Mathematics and Language Arts. So, for Mathematics, we assess students’ problem-solving skills, their knowledge of concepts and procedures, their ability to communicate their reasoning, and their ability to do modelling and data analysis. In Language Arts, we assess students’ reading comprehension skills, their writing skills, and their research skills,” she said.

“While we made adjustments by removing the Performance Task, those areas that we assessed did not change. We were still able to assess those areas and we were still able to report on those areas. Now while we remove the performance task, multiple choice, true and false, short answer questions, these are just different methods that we use to elicit students’ responses. So, the multiple-choice test is still able and is still capable of assessing students’ competence in these areas that I have outlined,” she added.

Ms. Ho-Young noted that there is a common misconception that multiple-choice assessments only test memorisation. However, she pointed out that this is not the case with PEP.

“We are able to assess higher-order thinking skills through the multiple-choice assessment, and we were able to do that this year with the grade-six PEP 2026 examination,” she stated.