Old Pots Cook Good Food: Keep the SBA, But Season It For A New Age

CASTRIES, St. Lucia – If you have raised or taught a teenager in the Caribbean over the past fifty years, you know the SBA. You have lived it: the kitchen table covered in questionnaires, the child who suddenly needs to interview a fisherman or measure the school yard, the late-night printing, the sigh of relief when the folder is finally handed in. The School-Based Assessment has been part of our family life, our staffrooms, and our children’s certificates for nearly half a century.

In July, the Caribbean Examinations Council announced that for most academic subjects, that era is ending. Citing the rise of artificial intelligence – chatbots that can write a polished essay in seconds – CXC will phase out the traditional SBA for Mathematics, English, Caribbean History, Social Studies, Principles of Business, and Information Technology. Only subjects it considers hands-on, such as agricultural science, the arts, and physical education, will keep theirs.

In place of the SBA, students in the affected subjects will sit an examination called Paper 032: a written paper taken under supervision, with three softeners – the topics released about a month in advance, extra time on the clock, and permission to carry notes into the room. CAPE moves fully to the new arrangement in 2027; CSEC schools may choose either route in 2027, with the change complete by 2028.

CXC deserves credit for naming the problem honestly. Teachers across the region will tell you it is now genuinely difficult to know whether a take-home assignment was written by the student or by a machine. The integrity of our children’s qualifications matters, and no serious person should pretend otherwise. But there is a world of difference between diagnosing an illness correctly and prescribing the right medicine. On the remedy, CXC has got it wrong – and the region should say so before the change becomes permanent.

What the SBA was really for

It helps to remember why the SBA exists at all. A three-hour examination can test what a child remembers under pressure. It cannot test whether a young person can frame a question, gather evidence over weeks, apply what they have learned to a real situation, take feedback, revise, and see a piece of work through to the end. Those are precisely the abilities that adult life – every job, every business, every community responsibility – actually demands. The SBA was built to certify them.

There is something else parents and teachers should know, because it is a matter of regional pride. School-based assessment is not a foreign fashion we copied. CXC built it into its examinations from the very first sitting in 1979, when almost every other examination system on Earth still relied entirely on the final written paper. The United Kingdom did not put coursework at the heart of the GCSE until 1988. New Zealand followed in 2002. Singapore – the system the world now holds up as the gold standard – introduced its school-based science assessment only in the mid-2000s, a full generation after us. In this field, the Caribbean did not follow the world. The world followed the Caribbean. To abandon that inheritance at the first serious challenge, rather than repair it, would be to hand back something our own examiners taught everyone else.

Why Paper 032 cannot do the job

Look closely at the three concessions attached to the new paper, because they quietly admit what is being lost. Topics released a month early are meant to mimic preparation. Extra time is meant to mimic the space to develop an argument. Notes carried into the room are meant to mimic research. CXC clearly knows that what the SBA cultivated is precious – the new paper is dressed up in its clothes. But a month’s notice of a topic is not a month of investigation. A folder of notes is not the experience of building a body of evidence. Forty extra minutes is not the slow, iterative drafting through which real thinking happens. You cannot compress months of learning into a single sitting any more than you can pour a river into a cup.

There are practical worries too. When something stops being examined, it soon stops being taught: expect less project work, less fieldwork, less applied learning in classrooms across the region. The new format favours children with strong exam technique and well-coached study support, while taking away the longer runway on which many quieter, slower-processing students do their best work – and it piles everything onto one high-pressure morning, which sits oddly beside CXC’s own concern for student wellbeing. Even the line between ‘practical’ and ‘non-practical’ subjects is hard to defend. Anyone who has taught Information Technology or Mathematics knows they are deeply practical disciplines; anyone who has taken a class of teenagers to a heritage site knows that History and Social Studies come alive precisely through fieldwork.

The deepest problem, though, is about the future our children are walking into. Artificial intelligence is now part of the world of work and study, whether we like it or not. The graduates who will thrive are those who can direct these tools, check them, and take responsibility for the result. An assessment system that responds to AI by retreating into a room where AI is banned is training young people for a world that no longer exists.

The better answer: make the task too real to fake

Here is the alternative the region should be debating: keep the SBA for academic subjects, but redesign it around work that no chatbot can do on a child’s behalf – because the work is rooted in the child’s own community, their own data, and their own voice.

Picture what this looks like. A Mathematics student adopts a market vendor and spends weeks recording costs and takings, then builds a pricing model that helps the vendor actually earn more. An English student sits with the elders of the village and captures the stories, proverbs, and Creole expressions that exist nowhere in print, producing an anthology the community keeps. A History student stands in the fort or the old estate yard in their own town, photographs it, interviews the caretaker, and argues how that history should be told to today’s public. A Business student helps a hairdresser or a small farmer set up proper books for the first time. An IT student builds a working database for the church, the co-op, or the clinic. These are not fantasies; they are the ordinary riches of Caribbean community life, waiting to be connected to the syllabus.

Each project would rest on three simple pillars. First, the applied project itself – a real task, with a real community partner, producing something of the student’s own making. Second, a process record: the dated photographs, interview notes, drafts, and data that show the journey as it happened, including an honest declaration of any AI tools used and how their output was checked and corrected. Third – and this is the lock on the door – a short oral defence: five to ten minutes in which the student explains their choices and answers questions they have not seen. A child who did the work can talk about it. A child who did not, cannot. No chatbot can prepare a student to answer for a fort they never visited or a vendor they never met.

Notice what this does to artificial intelligence. It stops being a ghost-writer and becomes what it will be in our children’s working lives: a tool they must direct, question, and account for. That is not a threat to integrity. That is a lesson in it.

And notice what it gives back to us. Under this model, every SBA leaves something behind: a small business better run, a family history preserved, a community record digitised, a skill passed on. CXC has even shown us how to crown it – years ago the Council published a book of the best CSEC short stories, turning students into published authors. Imagine a regional anthology of the finest community projects every year or two. The surest cure for children outsourcing their creativity is to make their own creativity visible and celebrated.

What parents and teachers can do

This is not yet a settled matter. For CSEC, 2027 is a choice year in which schools may use either the old SBA or the new paper – which means there is room, if the region asks for it, to pilot a third option: the redesigned, community-applied SBA, evaluated fairly alongside the other two before the door closes in 2028.

So ask the questions. Parents: at the next PTA meeting, ask your principal which route the school will take, and whether your ministry has raised the redesign option with CXC. Teachers: through your associations and subject panels, say plainly whether you would rather invigilate a longer exam or assess real projects anchored by a short conversation with each child. Ministries and CXC have consulted before; they will listen if the region speaks.

Our grandmothers had a saying for moments like this one: old pots cook good food. When a seasoned pot develops a fault, you do not throw it on the rubbish heap and buy a shiny new one that cannot hold a proper stew. You repair it, you re-season it, and it cooks better than ever. The SBA is our old pot – a Caribbean invention that fed generations and taught the world. Artificial intelligence has cracked it, no question. But the answer is not to retire it to the cupboard and serve our children a thinner meal. The answer is to mend it, season it for a new age, and put it back on the fire.

Dr. Didacus Jules, the current Director General Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) served as Registrar and chief executive officer of the Caribbean Examinations Council from 2008-2014.