Secondary Entrance Assessment
Encyclopedia
The Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) is a government exam sat by children aged 11 to 13 of Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...

 as part of the admissions process for all public secondary schools. The SEA was introduced in 2001, to replace the older Common Entrance exam.

Subjects

The SEA tests students on three areas, Language Arts
Language arts
Traditionally, the primary divisions in the language arts are Literature and Language, where language in this case refers to both linguistics, and specific languages....

, Mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 and Creative Writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...

.

Language Arts

The Language Arts section of the exam is divided into three sections, testing respectively Grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

 Skills, Vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...

 and Creative Writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...

.

Mathematics

The Mathematics section of the exam is divided into three sections of general mathematics content, with the difficulty and value of the questions increasing with respect to section.

Creative Writing

In the Creative Writing section, students must choose to write either a story or a letter, from a small choice subject material. The themes chosen usually reflect some aspect of Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 life, such as picking fruit or apologizing to a neighbor for a broken window.

Comparison to the Common Entrance Examinations

The precursor to the SEA, the Common Entrance exam, was multiple choice and tested a wider range of subjects. English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, Mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, Social Studies
Social studies
Social studies is the "integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence," as defined by the American National Council for the Social Studies...

 and Science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

were tested. Apart from a short Creative Writing Section at the end of the English section, the entire exam was multiple choice. Multiple choice was eliminated when the exams changed to the SEA, the idea being that a written exam would be more indicative of a child's education and competency.

External Links

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