Caribbean Examinations Council

CXC is an institution in the Caribbean, established in 1972, that has become a premier provider of globally competitive curriculum development services, examinations, certification and education services.

CXC comprises of 16 participating countries, including Antigua and Barbuda, to Trinidad and Tobago.

The first examinations for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) were offered in 1979 in five subjects. Subsequent to CSEC, CXC has introduced a comprehensive suite of qualifications to meet the needs of the region: Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment (CPEA), Caribbean Certificate of Secondary Level Competence (CCSLC), Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ), Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) and the CXC Associate Degree (CX®-AD).

The organisation also collaborates with countries in the Dutch Caribbean – Curaçao, Saba, St Eustatius and St Maarten, as well as Suriname.

Following a competitive procurement process in 2014, CXC selected RM as their partner to develop an e-marking service for its candidates and continue the implementation of their digital assessment strategy.

Under the remit of the service, when a candidate finishes their exam, the completed scripts are scanned and uploaded securely to the RM Assessor e-marking platform, so that CXC examiners are able to access an image of the completed script and mark it on-screen.

This enables examiners to mark scripts without the need to travel to marking centres, as they had previously, from the 16 islands across the Caribbean; it leads to improved efficiency as the system removes the manual addition of marks by the examiner; and examiners are now able to commence marking as soon as the scripts are made available online, rather than waiting until the scheduled event at a marking centre.

As the contract has evolved, RM has introduced new features such as supporting the marking of digital submissions as well as paper scripts – something that CXC has started to use for School Based Assessments and will increasingly adopt as the institution moves into more on-screen testing.