Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald said yesterday his ministry is in the final stages of drafting a proposal for a standardized diploma, which will soon be taken to Cabinet for approval.

The new guidelines are expected to lessen the number of students who leave high school without a basic grasp of literacy and numeracy.

The diploma will set benchmarks a public school student has to meet for high school graduation. It is part of the ministry's strategy to improve national test scores.

"We at the ministry are not satisfied with the outcome of students," Fitzgerald said at a press conference.

"Particularly when it comes to mathematics now, there is a lot of room for improvement."

The minister said that 50 percent of students do not meet high school graduation requirements, adding that math grades are "unacceptable".

However, his ministry is focused on improving grades.

"Fifty percent of our students are doing well," Fitzgerald said. "Even as much as 70 percent depending on how you look at it, but we really need to find strategies to deal with the other 30 percent."

Fitzgerald said results from the 2013 Bahamas Junior Certificate (BJC) exams, which test students' knowledge at the end of 9th grade, show that 69 percent received grades between A and C.

His ministry intends to raise this figure to between 80 and 85 percent by 2017.

"What we have found in the past is that when we receive these results we really have not put in place the strategies to deal with the students who have essentially fallen through the cracks and who are not performing well," Fitzgerald said. "

They continue to move from year to year without the necessary required intervention that is needed. So we are working very diligently now to ensure that at the end of the day when the kids graduate from high school, that we have what we consider to be a basic education and that will be outlined as minimum requirement at that level."

The new requirements are expected to help identify students who are entering grade 10 who do not meet minimum graduation standards.

The standardized diploma will create targets each student has to meet for graduation, including attendance levels and community service.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Education released results for the 2013 Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) exams and BJCs.

The BGCSE results reveal that math scores fell from E+ to E.

Poor math scores are due in part to the Ministry of Education's ongoing challenge in finding skilled math teachers locally and abroad, Fitzgerald said.

The ministry hopes to counter this with the introduction of its professional development institute at the former Mable Walker Primary School, which is set to open by the end of the year.

The institute will provide teachers with year round training options instead of the two-week summer sessions that are currently available. The ministry is also encouraging more teaching students to major in mathematics.

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