Letter to ST Forum - PSLE Slaughter?

I sent this to Straits Times after reading quite a few letters from parents whose children came out of the PSLE papers crying.

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I'm rather put out to read that a number of students sitting the PSLE papers this year came out crying. I suppose this must happen every year but if recent reports are anything to go by, this year's papers appear to be especially killing.

First of all, why are these students so unable to deal with a situation that appears not to be in their favour? Are they so used to achieving all their goals and so conditioned to find failure and imperfection unthinkable that a simple matter of not being able to answer each and every question can so easily break them, to bring on tears?

It would have been a lot more reassuring to have read that they can console themselves for having done their best, and being truly content and comforted with that despite the tough papers. I would then know that we have a generation of tough young people growing up. But that was not the case.

I'm deeply concerned that the drilling and grilling that these students have been put through in the past year has only been focused on driving them to believe that failure or imperfection is not acceptable. If so, parents and teachers had better beware that such methods and emphasis are simply doing these children a great disservice: it is setting them up for a lifetime of continued disappointment and dissatisfaction. After all, whoever has heard of a life with not a single failure or imperfection in it? If students cannot cope with an artifically set up situation such as an exam, what more the much harder real life issues that come up later on?

And so what if they do not get the cut-off points to enter that very secondary school that they (or more likely their parents) have been eyeing? There are lots of schools in Singapore which offer a very decent secondary education, not just that small handful deemed good enough.

Secondly, why worry about the outcome when the entire cohort of Primary 6 pupils are taking the very same tests? This simply means that upon marking, the distinction between students and their abilities will be made all the clearer, and I can bet that the scores will be moderated such that the top students will still get their fair share of A*s whether or not their actual mark is 91/100 or higher. It will all be adjusted and scaled accordingly in the end.

I do wish parents and students alike can look beyond the immediate goal of merely answering every question correctly. No doubt an easy paper will allow this, but so also will just about everyone taking the paper do equally well. Then what's the point of having an exam if it can't scale the students's abilities meaningfully?

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