Almost 5,000 Jamaica public secondary-school students who sat the 2010 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations ended up without a single pass.

However, this represents a continuing reduction in the number of students failing to pass even one subject.

For the 2010 examinations, 14.2 per cent of the 33,888 students who faced the examiners for the year failed every subject they sat.

But local educators can take some comfort in the constant trend which started after 2007, when just over 7,200, or 23 per cent, of the students finished without a pass.

Last year, 5,261 students, or 16.2 per cent of those who sat CSEC subjects, failed to achieve a passing grade.

The numbers are contained in a

document

prepared by the Programme, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of the education ministry, based on preliminary data from the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC).

The data show that approximately 47 per cent of public secondary-school students obtained passes in one to four subjects – a slight decrease of one per cent over 2009.

The major good news in the data is that slightly less than 33 per cent of the Jamaican candidates passed five to eight subjects, a performance similar to last year’s.

In addition, almost four per cent of Jamaican public-school students who sat the examinations attained passes in nine or more subjects.

There was one student who passed 13 subjects, surpassing Jamaica’s record for the most passes in one CSEC sitting, which was 12, achieved in 2008 and 2009.