Students across the region who sat Spanish and office administration in this January's Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations got the best results.

According to a release from the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), 75 per cent of the entries in both subjects got grades I-III. These were followed by social studies, with 65 per cent and English language, 59 per cent.

The performance in English language is a 10 per cent improvement over that of 2008, when 49 per cent of the entries achieved grades I-III.

CXC said performances in mathematics, which improved last year, suffered a decline. Forty-nine per cent of entries achieved grades I-III compared with 56 per cent in 2008.

Challenges

The mathematics examining committee cited the areas of geometry, measurement, trigo-nometry and vectors as those posing the most challenges to candidates.

Performance also declined in the three science subjects this year.

The examining committee concluded that candidates seemed to be inadequately prepared for the examination.

With specific reference to chemistry, the committee said results reflected inadequate coverage of the organic section of the syllabus. The examining committee for biology described as "disappointing" candidates' per-formance on questions dealing with genetics.

Information technology saw a slight decline in the number of candidates achieving grades I-III; 57 per cent gained acceptable grades this year compared with 59 per cent in 2008.

In accounting for the decline, the committee said that while performances continued to improve in the areas of word processing and spreadsheet, "the database management and programming questions continue to yield the weaker performances".

Overall performance declined slightly when compared with 2008; 55 per cent of entries achieved grades I-III this year compared with 57 per cent last year.

CXC offered 12 subjects at the January sitting this year. The CSEC January examinations are normally written by persons who wish to repeat examinations to improve their grades and those who take the examinations as private candidates.

There was a seven per cent increase in the number of candidates who wrote the CSEC examination at the January sitting.

This year, 26,093 candidates took the examinations, compared with 24,371 candidates in 2008. However, the number of subject entries declined by 12 per cent, dropping from 49, 567 in 2008 to 43,910.

petrina.francis@gleanerjm.com