With regard to this year’s SEC and Matsec results, it has become the norm to ignore issues that might bring to light why so many students could be failing their exams.

Many point a finger at the curriculum, others talk about the gap between the teaching and the exam paper and insist students must attend private lessons to get adequate instruction.

These may all be valid reasons why students fail. However, another issue has haunted me for quite some time: the correction of the papers. If a student calls for a revision of the paper, the only thing they get back is a report on that paper, period.

Students should be given a copy of the corrected paper to see where they went wrong and, if need be, to contest the corrections.

No person on earth is infallible so mistakes in correction could well be a prime cause for exam failures. We’ve all heard students saying they were convinced they did well and expected a certain mark only to be shocked by their result.

So the question here is: why do the departments concerned hold back on such an important issue, which could eliminate at least one unknown from the exa, that is, failure equation while reassuring us that the teaching personnel are doing their jobs right?

In past years, major mistakes have come to light, unearthed by the students themselves. What’s so terrifying about handing their own work back to students? Could it be that it would put markers on their toes and they would otherwise opt not to correct exam papers to make some extra money?

The whole future of students depends on exam papers that are accurately corrected.