{{Short description, School exam in Trinidad and TobagoThe Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) is a government exam sat by children aged 11 to 13 of

Trinidad and Tobago Trinidad and Tobago, officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the southernmost island country in the Caribbean, comprising the main islands of Trinidad and Tobago, along with several List of islands of Trinidad and Tobago, smaller i ...

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, which includes Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation and Capitalization and Comprehension,and a Graphic Task 6,

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

, and

Creative Writing Creative writing is any writing that goes beyond the boundaries of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on craft and technique, such as narrative structure, character ...

Structure

Language Arts

The Language Arts section of the exam is divided into three sections, testing respectively

Grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rul ...

Skills, Spelling, Punctuation,,Vocabulary, Graphic and

Comprehension Comprehension may refer to: * Comprehension (logic), the totality of intensions, that is, properties or qualities, that an object possesses * Comprehension approach, several methodologies of language learning that emphasize understanding language ...

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. For example section one is usually one(1) mark per question, section two(2) is two(2) or three(3) marks and section three(3) is four(4) marks

Creative Writing

In the Creative Writing section, students must choose to write either a narrative or a report, from a small choice subject material. The themes chosen usually reflect some aspect of

Caribbean The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...

life, such as picking fruit or apologizing to a neighbor for a broken window. Creative writing is assessed in grades four and five. In grade four students are to write factual passages and in grade five students are to write narrative descriptive passages

Preparation for the Exam

Parents and Students both find preparing for this exam a difficult task, mainly due to the emphasis placed on passing for the First Choice school. Many students attend after-school Private Lessons. Leading towards the exam, most students will prepare via Practice Tests and Past Papers from previous years; these are usually sold by private organizations; Local newspapers also regularly offer free tests on set days. As of 2010, a free to use website has been available for all students within

; pennacool.com offers exercises for 24 Topics in both

and

Language Arts English studies (or simply, English) is an academic discipline taught in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education in English-speaking countries. This is not to be confused with English taught as a foreign language, which is a distin ...

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,

Social Studies In many countries' curricula, social studies is the combined study of humanities, the arts, and social sciences, mainly including history, economics, and civics. The term was coined by American educators around the turn of the twentieth century as ...

and

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

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

* Th
Ministry of Education
- official website.
Pennacool.com
- SEA Practice Tests Online Education in Trinidad and Tobago