Making exams easier? Why? Too hard ah?

Ooh! Big news! Our Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein is making extreme education reforms ala Tony Blair. While Tony the tiger is on a warpath to curb discipline in schools and improve the level of reading, Hishammuddin has taken the "relax-lah" approach and is making the way for easier exams with less subjects and demoting their importance.

"What for?" my anti-rote learning, anti-memorisation, Singaporean (quite contradictory, right?) boyfriend asks. "Exams too hard ah?"

"Must be lah, I think... so hard yet number of As in SPM keep increasing every year. Now 10A1s not normal adi, like that is sub standard. Now must get at least 15As!"

There's an obvious non-correlation here. And thus the Education Minister has decided exams don't seem to separate the cows from the sheep and so, lets not try and review the exam system and make questions more analytical, lets not involve more critical thinking. Lets take the easy way out - take out more subjects, put in more practical/project based assessments. After all a subjective evaluation will make it easier to tell cow from sheep now. (And this way if we give more marks to a particular segment of society, no one can argue what! It's all subjective).

Now some people would think this is a great move away from the old fashioned exam based system. But in a young country like Malaysia - where our exams are barely internationally recognised, where we have only just made the switch to teach in English, where teaching is a lowly paid profession (and these days you only become a teacher if you don't have the SPM/GCSE results to get a better job), where meritocracy in scholarship awards is still a new fangled idea - you can't bring in a system like this. We'll fall apart.

Good Malaysian teachers (of whom I've only met about 8 in my life) will make it succeed. But what about the other 80% of incompetant teachers whom I've had the joy of meeting? I'll tell you what more project work will be like. In chemistry it will mean following a list of instructions as if baking a cake and instead of asking "why it oxidises" or "did the covalence bonds matter" it will be "teacher, solution not enough lah"... "teacher, this bunsen burner no gas"... followed by an inept teacher being unable to give answers or coaxing her young students to think. Worse still, I can imagine the project work for History, for 'The effects of WWII on South East Asia" will be directly plagarised from the internet, and then translated into Malay to avoid being caught. And no one will be the wiser.

And they want this to start from primary school? What other projects can you give young kids that aren't already being done? "Fototropisme in a shoebox"? (I did that in primary 4, ok?) What if the poor kid's taugeh beans (green beans) refuse to grow? Give the kid a D which forever plague him?

Here's what we really need in our exam system! We need kids to pick up math much faster and earlier. We need kids to pick up critical reading before they hit secondary school. We need more subjects to be taught in English (do you know how much more History I could have learnt!!! I think I would have learnt so much more if we were allowed to debate History in class). We need a marking system where keywords matter NOT the exact replication of phrases (i.e. Moral Studies - in fact we need to do away with this exam altogether). We need more creative and better set exam questions with a proper answer scheme that isn't sold to Sasbadi for publication rights.

We need so much more. I could rant for days. But I have to make a call and get to Uni to hand out hoodies. Sorry for the abrupt end. Mud coloured EE hoodies await.