TL;DR: The Caribbean Examinations Council, headquartered on Pine Plantation Road in Bridgetown, announced in mid-July 2026 that it is phasing out School-Based Assessments (SBAs) for most CSEC and CAPE subjects by 2028, replacing take-home coursework with an invigilated written exam called Paper 032. The reason is blunt: Director of Operations Dr Nicole Manning said generative AI has made it too hard to know whether submitted coursework is a student's own work. CXC surveyed nearly 2,400 educators first, and roughly three in four backed the change. The Jamaica Teachers' Association is not fully convinced, warning CXC was caught flat-footed and that a new exam paper does not solve the wider problem of AI in classrooms. For Barbados, the story is not abstract. The decision was made a few miles from Bridgetown's centre, at the same time the island's own Ministry of Educational Transformation is pushing the opposite direction domestically, toward more continuous assessment for the Common Entrance exam. Two reforms, opposite instincts, same government town.
What Just Happened
On 16 and 17 July 2026, CXC confirmed one of the biggest changes to its assessment model in the organisation's history: coursework, in the form students and teachers across the Caribbean have known it for decades, is going away for most subjects. Registrar and CEO Dr Wayne Wesley framed it as a matter of institutional credibility rather than a technology upgrade. "CXC will always act in the best interest of the region, even when that requires difficult decisions," he said, adding, "the integrity of our qualifications is not negotiable."
Dr Nicole Manning, CXC's Director of Operations and the public face of the reform, put it even more plainly: a CXC qualification "means something to employers, to universities, to parents, families and guardians," and that meaning collapses the moment nobody can say with confidence who actually wrote the coursework. Her sharpest line, reported by Kaieteur News, cuts past the technology question entirely: "Integrity is not about whether a machine can detect what you did. It is about who you choose to be."
Why Coursework Broke
School-Based Assessments were built on a reasonable assumption: a project completed over weeks, at home, with research, drafts, and teacher feedback along the way, tests something an exam-room paper cannot, sustained independent work. That assumption held for roughly fifty years. It did not survive contact with a free chatbot that can produce a fluent, well-structured essay, lab report, or business plan in seconds, tailored to whatever rubric a student pastes in.
CXC did not act on instinct. Before announcing anything, the council ran consultations across 21 Caribbean states and territories and surveyed close to 2,400 educators directly. Seventy-seven percent supported scrapping the traditional SBA model for CSEC, and 76 percent backed the equivalent move for CAPE. That is not a narrow, contested vote. It is a regional teaching profession telling its own examining body that the coursework model, as it stood, could no longer be trusted to measure what it claimed to measure.
Not every subject is affected equally. Practical subjects, Agricultural Science, Visual Arts, Music, Physical Education, Technical Drawing, and Food, Nutrition and Health, keep the SBA format, on the reasonable logic that a plated dish, a painted canvas, or a performed piece is much harder for a chatbot to fake. It is the theory-heavy subjects, Mathematics, English, Caribbean History, Social Studies, Principles of Business, and Information Technology among them, where the written coursework is disappearing.
What Paper 032 Actually Looks Like
Paper 032 is not simply a second written exam bolted onto the existing ones. CXC has tried to preserve some of what made SBAs valuable while removing the part that broke: the unsupervised writing window. Candidates get their topic roughly one month ahead of the assessment, are given extended time to work through it, and are permitted to bring approved reference notes into the exam room. What changes is where the final piece of writing gets produced, under invigilated conditions, in a single sitting, rather than assembled over weeks on a home laptop with a chatbot tab open beside the essay draft.
CXC is explicit that the design intent is not to raise anxiety. Dr Manning told regional media the reform is "not intended to increase pressure or anxiety for candidates" and pointed to the advance topic notice and support materials, sensitisation sessions, webinars, and teacher resources, as the buffer against exam-hall panic replacing coursework stress.
"If de children could type up a whole project in ChatGPT before dem could tie dem own shoe-laces, how CXC expect de SBA to still mean anything? Dis change overdue, but Lord, poor teacher gine have plenty marking to catch up on come exam week."
A secondary school teacher in Bridgetown, speaking about the reformNot Everyone Is Convinced
The reform has a genuine critic, and it is not coming from parents nervous about a harder exam. The Jamaica Teachers' Association argues CXC is treating a symptom while leaving the underlying disease alone. In the JTA's reading, CXC "appears to have been caught largely unprepared" by how fast generative AI moved into classrooms, becoming, in its words, "a casualty of the very technological transformation" it is now scrambling to respond to.
The association's sharper point is about scope. Paper 032 fixes the SBA specifically. It does nothing about the AI use happening everywhere else in a student's academic life. "The misuse of AI is not confined to students completing SBAs," the JTA said. "It affects homework, internal examinations, research assignments." The association also flagged an equity concern that regional education officials will need to sit with: uneven access to devices, reliable internet, and AI-literate teachers across schools could widen, not narrow, the very disparities the reform is meant to protect against. Its recommendation was not a tweak to Paper 032. It was a call for education ministries across the region to convene teachers, parents, students, and technologists and build "a national policy on AI in education," on the grounds that "schools cannot be left to navigate these complex ethical, instructional and assessment issues individually."
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Get AI Governance SupportWhy Barbados Carries This Story Differently
Every Caribbean territory that runs CSEC or CAPE is affected by this reform. Barbados is affected differently, because CXC's decision was not made somewhere else and mailed in. It was made on Pine Plantation Road in Saint Michael, at the headquarters CXC opened in Barbados in 2015. Dr Manning, Dr Wesley, and the council that signed off on scrapping fifty years of coursework work out of Bridgetown. When a Barbadian sixth-former asks a teacher why the SBA is disappearing, the honest answer is that the decision was made up the road, not abroad.
There is a local irony worth sitting with too. While CXC pulls the region away from coursework-style assessment for CSEC and CAPE, Barbados's own Ministry of Educational Transformation, under Minister Chad Blackman, has been moving the island's Common Entrance exam in the opposite direction domestically, phasing out the single high-stakes sitting in favour of a continuous assessment model that tracks a child's development over time. One reform trusts sustained, ongoing work more. The other trusts it less, because AI broke the ability to verify it. Both are defensible on their own terms. Together, they say something honest about where Caribbean education actually is right now: it does not yet have one coherent answer for how much to trust work produced outside an invigilator's eyeline, and it is running two different experiments to find out.
That tension is not a reason to panic. It is a reason for Barbados specifically, given CXC's address, to lead rather than simply comply. The island's Ministry of Educational Transformation, University of the West Indies Cave Hill, and the Barbados Community College are all close enough to CXC's headquarters to be first movers on teacher training for Paper 032, rather than waiting for guidance to arrive from a building they can see from the highway.
The Bigger Miss
Paper 032 solves an assessment-integrity problem. It does not solve an AI-literacy problem, and those are not the same thing. A student who never learns to use a generative AI tool honestly, to draft, question, and revise with it rather than simply copy its output, walks into a Paper 032 exam hall with the same gap in judgement they would have walked into an SBA deadline with, just now with less opportunity to expose it before it matters. The JTA's equity warning points at the same gap from a different angle: schools with strong digital literacy programmes will adapt to Paper 032 faster than schools without one, widening a divide the reform never intended to create.
The honest fix sits upstream of any single exam paper. It is curriculum, not proctoring: teaching students explicitly how generative AI tools work, where they fail, and how to use them as a starting point for thinking rather than a substitute for it. Barbados has already put some of that infrastructure in motion. The National Digital Skills Empowerment Campaign, launched by the Ministry of Training and Tertiary Education after a National Digital Assessment found 41 percent of employees lacked essential digital skills, is aimed at the workforce, not schools, but it demonstrates the island already understands that digital capability has to be built deliberately rather than assumed. Extending that same seriousness into secondary school AI literacy, rather than only into exam-hall security, is the piece nobody has announced yet.
What Schools and Parents Should Actually Do Now
For a Barbadian CSEC candidate sitting exams in 2027, the practical choice sits with the school: move early to Paper 032, or wait the extra year the transition period allows. Parents should ask that question directly rather than assume the answer. For CAPE candidates, there is no choice to make, Paper 032 applies from the May-June 2027 sitting regardless. And for every student affected, the one-month advance topic notice in Paper 032 is worth treating as an opportunity rather than a formality: it rewards a student who genuinely masters the material over four weeks far more than it rewards one hoping to reconstruct a chatbot-drafted essay from memory under exam conditions.
None of this closes the debate CXC opened. It settles one exam paper's worth of it. The larger question, how the Caribbean teaches a generation that will use AI for the rest of its working life to also think without it when the moment calls for that, is still open, and Barbados, as the address on CXC's letterhead, has more reason than most to answer it first.
Related Reading Across the Caribbean AI Network
For more on the institutions and people shaping AI policy across the region:
- StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded by Adrian Dunkley
- Adrian Dunkley, the region's leading AI strategist
- Caribbean AI Association (CAIA), on practical AI adoption guidance for Caribbean institutions
- Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC), on AI governance frameworks for the region
- AI Jamaica, tracking the Jamaica Teachers' Association's response and Jamaica's own AI-in-schools debate
Frequently Asked Questions
What is CXC and why does this reform matter specifically for Barbados?
The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) is the regional body that sets the CSEC and CAPE qualifications used across the Commonwealth Caribbean, and it is headquartered on Pine Plantation Road in Saint Michael, Bridgetown, Barbados. The decision to phase out School-Based Assessments was made and announced from that Barbados address, which puts the island at the centre of a reform affecting secondary and sixth-form students in 21 territories.
What are School-Based Assessments (SBAs) and why is CXC phasing them out?
SBAs are coursework projects that CSEC and CAPE candidates complete over weeks or months, usually outside the exam room, as part of their final grade. CXC is phasing them out for most non-practical subjects because Director of Operations Dr Nicole Manning said generative AI tools have made it increasingly difficult to determine whether a submitted SBA is genuinely the student's own work, which threatens the credibility of the qualification itself.
What is Paper 032 and how is it different from the old SBA?
Paper 032 is a supervised, invigilated written assessment that replaces the take-home SBA for most subjects. Candidates receive the examination topic roughly one month in advance, are given extended time to prepare, and may bring approved reference notes into the exam room, but the actual written response is produced under exam-hall conditions rather than at home, closing off the main channel through which unverified AI-generated content entered coursework.
When does the change take effect for CSEC and CAPE students?
CAPE candidates move fully to Paper 032 starting with the May-June 2027 sitting. For CSEC, schools can choose between the traditional SBA and Paper 032 during the 2027 academic year, but by the May-June 2028 sitting every CSEC candidate across the region must sit Paper 032. Practical subjects such as Agricultural Science, Visual Arts, Music, Physical Education, Technical Drawing, and Food, Nutrition and Health keep the SBA format, with strengthened internal moderation.
How much support was there for the reform among Caribbean teachers?
CXC surveyed close to 2,400 educators across the region ahead of the announcement. Seventy-seven percent supported the change at the CSEC level and 76 percent backed the equivalent change for CAPE, according to CXC's own figures reported by Kaieteur News and other regional outlets in July 2026.
Has anyone pushed back against the reform?
Yes. The Jamaica Teachers' Association argued that CXC was caught largely unprepared by how quickly generative AI reshaped classroom work, and warned that Paper 032 only addresses AI misuse inside SBAs, not in homework, internal school exams, or research assignments generally. The JTA also raised equity concerns about uneven device and internet access across schools, and called for a comprehensive national policy on AI in education rather than an assessment fix alone.
Does this reform mean schools are teaching students to use AI responsibly?
Not directly. Paper 032 changes how students are tested, moving the writing back into a supervised room, but it does not by itself teach AI literacy, meaning how to use generative tools for research and drafting while still doing the thinking yourself. CXC's reform manages the assessment-integrity risk; building the curriculum that teaches students to work with AI honestly is a separate, still largely unaddressed task for Ministries of Education across the region, including Barbados.
What should Barbadian parents, teachers, and students do to prepare?
Schools offering CSEC in the 2027 sitting will need to decide whether to move early to Paper 032 or wait one more year, so parents should ask their child's school directly which path it plans to take. Students should treat the one-month topic notice and permitted reference notes in Paper 032 as an invitation to build genuine command of the material early, rather than assuming the old habit of assembling a project the night before, generative AI or not, will still work.
Supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded by Adrian Dunkley, the region's leading AI voice on how artificial intelligence is reshaping Caribbean institutions, from grid operators to examining bodies.