Lip service: My thoughts on the latest meddling in the education system

The Ministry of Education (MOE) yesterday announced a host of drastic changes in the education system with the aim of reducing the emphasis on grades. (TODAYonline article)

I have mixed feelings about the changes. Some are heading in the right direction while others fly totally wide of the mark.

Here are the major changes and my reactions to them.

Change: Primary 1 and 2 pupils will have totally no exams. Primary 3 and 5 and Secondary 1 and 3 students will only have exams at the end of the year.
I don't like to eat vegetables. Every time vegetables appear on my plate, I will use my fork and poke at them halfheartedly, pushing them here and there but never actually putting them in my mouth. That's exactly the analogy I would use to describe this change. The vegetables represent the exam-related stress that MOE purports to be trying to reduce. The child holding the fork is MOE itself. By getting rid of some exams but not others, they are simply taking the stress that would have been allocated to the exams they got rid of, and piling it onto the exams that are left. The total amount of stress doesn't change. In fact, it's now concentrated on the few exams that are actually still around. The poor kids will end up suffering because they coast along happily for almost two years with no exams, then get hothoused intensely to face a set of exams that loom suddenly from out of nowhere, then coast along happily for close to another two years, then get hothoused intensely to face another set of exams, et cetera. They don't get to build up the soft skills required to take exams effectively and cope with the associated pressures, and that's no good because at the end of the day, the monstrosity that is the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is still there.

Change: All students from Pri 3 to Sec 4 or Sec 5 will not have more than one weighted assessment per subject per school term. Weighted assessments count towards the child's overall score at the end of the year and include class tests and project work.
This change runs totally counter to what MOE should be doing. They should be having more weighted assessments, each accounting for less of the overall grade. That's how to redistribute the stress load and reduce the emphasis on exams. There should also be a greater variety of assessment methods, like topical quizzes, short speeches, longer presentations, and activities where kids have to create something from scratch. Everything should contribute to the final score somehow, similar to the way we are assessed at the tertiary level where we do a few assignments that, together with the formal tests and exams, make up our final grade. Exams don't inculcate 21st century competencies. Assignments and projects do. So have more of them, and make them count.

Change: The report book will be redesigned as shown in the diagram below, taken from the MOE press release.

Taken from the TODAYonline website; original source from MOE press release.

Let's look at each deleted element individually.

• Class and level position: No arguments here. I can see how this might breed an unhealthy sense of competition and discourage weaker students. Students don't need to know their exact ranking to have a sense of where they stand relative to their peers.
• Class and level mean: This, I disagree with. Like I've said before, the national exams like the PSLE and O Levels aren't disappearing anytime soon, and everybody knows those use the bell curve for grading where students are competing directly with their peers to get the coveted A grades. Therefore it's very useful for these students to be able to keep track of their performance relative to the rest of their cohort throughout their time in school. It doesn't need to be in the form of rankings, which are unnecessarily detailed. But mean scores are important because students who see that they are below the mean in a certain subject will know that they need to do something to improve in that subject. Ignorance is bliss but it'll lead to a rude shock later when the national exam results are released, but by then it'll be too late.
• Minimum and maximum marks: I disagree with this for the same reasons as explained in the point immediately above. Students need to see if they're falling close to the minimum score so that they can make efforts to buck up. Conversely, students who are close to the maximum score in a certain subject can choose to strategically re-prioritise their study time for that subject to their weaker subjects instead.
• Underlining and/or colouring of marks for subjects failed: Empty and without substance. That's all I have to say about this one. Unless all students and parents in Singapore become visually handicapped or numerically challenged, this particular tweak isn't going to achieve anything. People will still look at the scores and highlight the failed subjects in their minds anyway.
• Pass/fail result: Why is it bad to tell students if they passed or failed? At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I shall say this again: Until we get rid of exams completely, students need to know how they are doing. They don't need the fine-grained details like their precise rank, but at least give them some statistics for them to chew on. Pass/fail is the most nominal, non-threatening piece of information for the purposes of performance tracking. I see no good reason for it to be removed.
• Mean subject grades: As a single summary value to represent how one is faring in school, mean subject grades (MSG) are without a doubt one of the most useful. Critics will argue that students can go around asking one another "What's your MSG?" and this fosters unhealthy competitiveness, but students can do that with the raw scores that are still in the report book too. And they can always compute the MSG themselves based on their raw scores. It's a simple averaging calculation that an upper-primary child can do in one minute. So taking it away, once again, serves no purpose.
• Overall total marks: Everything I just said about the MSG applies to this too. I'm tired of repeating myself.
• L1R5, L1R4, EMB3 and EMB1 for Lower Secondary levels: I guess the question here is whether L1R5 et al only become relevant at the upper secondary level when admission to junior colleges and polytechnics move to the forefront of students' collective consciousness. Do lower secondary students not need to know their L1R5? Again here I'd like to point out that it's the work of ten seconds for any student to figure out their L1R5 on their own, so what's the harm in giving it to them right away?

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is, providing students with information about their academic performance is not all bad. They need such information in order to survive within the current system which still requires them to take high-stakes exams at the so-called transition points in their educational journey. The key is to strike a balance between giving them too much information and too little. I say that numbers that are too exact, like a student's rank, can be justifiably removed, but more "big picture" statistics like averages, minimums, and maximums should be retained.

Change: Under the revised criteria for the Edusave awards, students will be assessed based on factors such as diligence, curiosity, collaboration and enthusiasm in daily lessons and learning activities.
It sounds good in theory, but such a qualitative and subjective system is open to a lot of abuse, discrimination, favouritism, bias, and, dare I say it, corruption. Singapore prides itself as a meritocratic society. Let's not design our education system in a way that rewards sucking up. Or are we now being cynical and training our young to be good at brown-nosing from an early age so they have an advantage at the workplace when they grow up?

The latest announcement by MOE ticked a couple of boxes for me, but sadly there were more misses than hits. However, it will be seven years before we get any concrete indication of what effect these changes have truly had, when the first batch of pupils under this revamped system take their PSLE.