Are Mauritius PSAC Exam Results Being Inflated by Easier Tests?

Mauritius's primary school leaving exam — the Primary School Achievement Certificate (PSAC) — consistently shows a national pass rate of around 77%, including 76.90% in the first session of 2025. On the surface, this looks like a stable, healthy education system. But a new investigative analysis raises a troubling question: are those numbers a genuine reflection of what children know — or a statistical mirage produced by making the exam easier? **What is the PSAC?** The PSAC is the examination sat by Grade 6 pupils (around age 11) at the end of primary school in Mauritius. It replaced the old Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) as part of the Nine-Year Continuous Basic Education (NYCBE) reform introduced progressively from 2017. The exam is set and managed by the Mauritius Examinations Syndicate (MES), the country's official public examinations body. **What the investigation found** The ION News analysis compares actual exam papers — the 2015 CPE paper versus the 2025 PSAC paper, both publicly available on the MES website — and identifies two major structural changes that appear to have made it significantly easier for pupils to score marks, without requiring deeper understanding. The first change is the widespread use of **scaffolding** in mathematics. Under the old CPE, a maths problem was presented as a whole, and pupils had to plan and execute a full solution independently. Under the PSAC, complex problems are broken into step-by-step sub-questions, each carrying its own marks. A pupil who understands only part of a problem can still accumulate a significant portion of the available marks. The second change is **follow-through marking**, a system where an examiner awards marks even if a student's earlier answer was wrong, as long as the subsequent working is consistent with their earlier (incorrect) result. This reduces the penalty for fundamental errors. In literacy, the shift is similarly significant. The old CPE required pupils to produce extended written answers independently — sentences, paragraphs, arguments. The PSAC increasingly uses visual recognition tasks, multiple-choice formats, and heavily guided response structures that require far less autonomous writing. **What international reports say** The findings do not sit in isolation. The World Bank, UNESCO, and the PASEC programme (which assesses learning outcomes in Francophone African and island school systems) have all flagged rising **learning poverty** in Mauritius — a measure of how many children reach the end of primary school unable to read or do basic arithmetic at age-appropriate levels. These reports suggest that pass rates and actual competency have been moving in opposite directions. **What this means** For parents, the concern is real: a child who passes the PSAC with a comfortable score may still struggle with tasks that require independent reading comprehension or multi-step problem solving. For policymakers, the implication is that headline pass rates are no longer a reliable tool for measuring the health of primary education. And for employers and secondary schools, it raises questions about whether Grade 6 leavers are genuinely prepared for the next stage of their education. The Ministry of Education and the MES have not responded publicly to these specific criticisms. The debate touches on a broader tension in education systems worldwide — between inclusive assessment design, which gives all pupils a chance to demonstrate partial knowledge, and rigorous benchmarking that accurately signals real-world competence. What is clear is that Mauritius cannot afford to let flattering statistics substitute for honest answers about what its children can actually do. Source: ION News