Contradictheory: Kids mean more than an exam

School assessment should be more about taking stock and future improvement not the result of a single paper or even of an entire exam. Photo: Bernama

THERE was a story recently of a kid who got RM10,000 from his parents for scoring 5As (and 1B) in his Standard Six UPSR exam (online at mStar). If you know me, then you’ll probably guess that I think this is a bad idea. It’s going to colour his idea of what doing exams are for, and by the time he gets to the SPM exam, he’ll probably argue it’s worth at least 10 times that.

But the big picture is that exam grades matter. Grades are what universities look at when deciding if somebody should be allowed to take a course. If you’re not already at a certain standard (especially in something as precise as Maths, which I did in university), then it makes the rest of the journey much harder. In short, good grades allow for good opportunities for good careers.