PUBLIC EXAMS SHOULD BE ABOLISHED. DO YOU AGREE?

Public examinations play an important role in a student‘s life in Malaysia. In his eleven years of
schooling, a student has to sit for three major public examinations, the UPSR, PMR and SPM.
These examinations are taken seriously by all parties involved, especially students because the
results are used for a wide range of purposes ranging from placement of students to awarding of
scholarships. Despite these advantages, I strongly believe that public examinations should be
abolished as they have several drawbacks.

To begin with, public examinations to some extent merely test a student‘s ability to memorise and
regurgitate facts. Bloom‘s taxonomy of learning ranks these skills as lower order thinking skills.
Higher order thinking skills such as application and inference are often neglected. Students with
excellent memory do well in such examinations while those with poor memorizing skills do
poorly. Thus, it is not surprising that many students with poor recall skills loathe subjects like
History and Biology. Another case in point is the Moral Education paper, which requires students
to memorise moral values. This is not a valid test as it tests only a student‘s knowledge of values,
not the practice of these values. An A in this paper does not guarantee that the student is a
morally sound and virtuous individual. And what about the student who gets an E? Are we
suggesting that he is not a morally upright individual?

Another reason why I am not in favour of public examinations is that they are not the best way to
identify a student‘s strengths or weaknesses. This is because these examinations test only certain
skills. Allow me to illustrate my point. The language papers, for example, test a student’s reading
and writing skills only and even so, the range of sub-skills tested is limited. An A in these
subjects does not reflect a student‘s competency in all areas of the language. For all you know, he
may be an incompetent speaker. Or for that matter, does a C mean a student is about average in
all the language skills? Do these grades tell us where a student‘s strengths and weaknesses lie?

Another major drawback is that teaching in schools today is largely influenced by public
examinations. Teachers teach to prepare students for exams and not for life. As such, many of our
students are ill-prepared to face the challenges of the real world. This also goes against the grain
of our National Philosophy of Education where the emphasis is on character building and the
development of human capital. All parties involved are to be blamed for this as they are more
concerned with student achievement and not student development. At the end of the day, parents
want straight A‘s for their children, principals want excellent performances from their students
and teachers, and the list goes on.

Finally, in their quest for excellent academic results, school becomes a bore and a chore.
Students are overwhelmed with homework, extra classes and tuition, and teachers are overworked,
leaving both parties with little or no time for relaxation. Thus, it is not surprising that students
choose to ignore co-curricular activities. They see these as a waste of precious time. Parents, too,
are affected by the emphasis on academic achievement. Some go to great lengths to secure private
tuition for their children, hiring only the best. Thus, we can conclude that public exams take the
fun out of learning. We cannot deny the fact that public examinations enable us to assess
thousands of students using a similar instrument but the question one needs to ask is who
eventually benefits from such a system? What happens to students who are not able to master
test-taking skills? Is academic excellence the only indicator of success as suggested by the public
examination system? In a world which is changing rapidly, we need to prepare our students for
the many challenges they will have to face as they will form the backbone of our nation in the
years to come. Taking into consideration the flaws of the public exam system, it is clear that we
should seriously consider other means of assessing students and do away with public exams.