Examinations frighten many so much so that the education fraternity is butting heads over the revival of the Ujian Pencapaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) and Pentaksiran Tingkatan Tiga (PT3).
Educationists' fear? Examinations retard holistic development of learners. If this were true, then those who are 18 years of age and older must be "mentally deficient". Be assured, they are not. Many are captaining corporations and nations. The real question is when and how to hold the examinations, not if we should have them at all.
Today, Malaysian learners have an "unexamined" life, so to speak, up to Form Five when they sit for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM). We think this to be too late in the learning life of our students. The shock of an examination at this age is, well, a shock. They must be eased into examinations along the way, not traumatised all of a sudden.
UPSR is perhaps too early in the age of the learner to face an exam. Yet, the Education Ministry used the Standard Six exam in the 1960s to get pupils as young as this out of the free public education system should they fail it. Quite a bit did.
The ministry might have been hoping that they would join private schools for a fee. No, they didn't because they couldn't afford it. We are glad the ministry is kinder now.
A rehearsal of the reasons for doing away with UPSR and PT3 may help answer the when and how of school examinations. To the ministry, school-based assessment, introduced in 2011, was being hampered by grade-chasing teachers. We find this to be a strange way to reason out of exams.
Granted, school-based assessments have been around since 2011, but to say it is better than exams is a bit of a stretch. True, exams have their downsides. But so do school-based assessments. No less than the National Union of the Teaching Profession is worried about the quality of assessments as each school seeks to evaluate the learners in its own way.
Here is another stranger one. UPSR and PT3 were abolished to enable teachers to make teaching and learning more creative and innovative, thus the ministry reasoned when announcing their abolishment. But if this were true, then not only UPSR and PT3 must be on the abolishment list, but also must all exams, including SPM. But SPM is safe.
So must PT3. That 12 is too early an age to sit for an exam is well-rehearsed. With this, we have no quarrel. As for the PT3, we are with the revivalists. At some point, we must have an exam and we think 15 to be the right age. Form Three is not too early, nor too late. But the question is how does the education system prepare our students for the PT3.
If the past is any guide, not well at all. Teachers in secondary schools tell us students who can't read and write somehow end up in Form One. Add arithmetic to complete the three R's, then you have a crisis in our teachers' hands. How did six years of their schooling get wasted like this? This isn't a 2022 lament. It was true in the 1960s, too.
The ailment is in the system. If the ministry hasn't found the cure to this, no evaluation will help. Be it school-based assessment or centralised examinations.