Malaysia has long been known to have among the most tuition centers (I guess in the world) and tuition has been a lucrative business (although teachers don’t seem to be a very respected profession here).  These tuition center prospers for the fact that there are at least 3 key examinations that every student in Malaysia go through:

• UPSR (Ujian Penilaian Sekolah Rendah)
• PMR (Penilaian Menengah Rendah)
• SPM (Sijil Peperiksaan Malaysia)

A couple of months ago, our Education Minister started exploring the possibilities of doing away with the UPSR and PMR, leaving SPM as the only examination.  Since then, there were many arguements between “to test or not to test”.  One of the more significant statements were “we could always do with other ways of assessments instead”.

Let’s do a surface analysis on the 3 examinations above.  The first 2 were indeed already “assessments” instead of “examination” just by the name it’s called. “Penilaian” means “Assessment” whereas “Peperiksaan” means “Examination”.  If anyone could recall PMR was introduced to replace SRP (Sijil Rendah Pelajaran).  Way back decades ago, the idea of changing the “certification” (Sijil) into an “assessment” (Penilaian) has already taken place.  However, if there are no means of execution; if the mindset doesn’t change; if the people remain with the same skills - there will not be any fundamental change to the mechanisms and results besides the change in name.

Next, let’s take a look at SPM.  SPM used to have “practical examination” for Science Papers which was later replaced with “Project Paper” and the same “Project Paper” format has been introduced to other subjects like History.  I can’t tell much about Geography, Economics … etc since I was a Science student (althoughy I believe project paper was introduced too).  This shows that the Education Department were indeed trying to move towards more practical ongoing assessment for a long time.

So why is Malaysia unable to remove examinations and replace it with on-going assessments instead?  There are few reasons that I could think of:

• The system is too huge to be changed.  There’s an inertia going on.  Any small change created will affect the long established system in the whole country.  To begin with, students will start to fare badly in the ongoing practical assessments because we’ve been through decades of memorizing.  Some who have became parents today were from the generation where education is about memorizing everything in the books, and it’s now going to be a challenge to guide the kids otherwise.
• I guess there’s an economic factor involved here.  If Examinations are scrapped, many tuition centres will be closed, teachers will not have an avenue to earn “part-time income” (which are often much more than their full-time income.  Would teaching will be attractive?  Would the government be able to compensate teachers enought to keep them interested to remain in the profession?  It’s a large economic sector to take care of.
• Finally, and the most important one.  Do we have sufficient “good teachers”?  The importance of any form of assesment is the ability to measure accross the whole nation for consistency.  That’s something only examinations can do for now.  We do not have teachers of the same quality accross the nation.  There are large gaps even within the same school.  (If you walk into some schools you might overhear students that says “I hope that teacher-A can teach my class because I don’t understand a thing teacher-B says”).
• Unlike accross the border down south where teaching is seen as an important profession (that gets compensated well too), I once had someone joking to me that teaching is a profession of last resort in Malaysia.  A teacher that got minimum credit for a subject may eventually be teaching someone who’s aspiring to get straight-As.  How are we going to expect the teacher to be able to assess the student when a young and bright student begins thinking out of the box beyond what the teacher could imagine?  Thus, exams within “marking script” becomes the best way to create standardize quality accross the country.  And it obviously doesn’t pay to be too creative in answering the questions.  Just memorize!

So my take on scrapping examinations? Yes, but with several conditions:

• Ensure that all teachers are of top quality.
• Or at least have a subject matter expert on every subject in every school that could guide on standardizing the assesments.

Both the above will mean more investment into education personnels (and better compensation for teachers!) … And it’s in-line with Malaysia becoming a High-Income Society!

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Tags: assessments, examinations, Malaysian Education, PMR, SPM, students, test, tuition, UPSR

This entry was posted by Clayton J.C Tan on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 9:16 am and is filed under Malaysian Education, Malaysian Politics, Youth Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.