Re-assess the assessment system

IT was a startling confession; one that exposed ugly truths that we have suspected for years but has been shrouded in secrecy.

No, I am not talking about Datuk Seri Tajuddin Abdul Rahman’s attack on his party president’s supposed “treachery” or the courtroom confession by a senior executive that he and his colleagues “cooked” company account books to purportedly pay bribes to former Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng.

I am talking about teacher Wan Maizura Kamaruddin. She’s an experienced educator who has decided to call it a day well before her retirement age.

The reason? She was fed up with being forced to “mark up” the results of her weak students and get them to pass when, in actual fact, they were just not good enough.

“I am someone who loves teaching,” she declared.

“But I had to lie when grading students’ academic proficiency even though they could not read.”

Apparently, she has the module to make good students even out of weak ones. But with “Little Napoleons” expecting her to do things outside of her scope as a teacher, she has had enough.

Was she right in walking away? We will never know, but I think I know what it feels like when your charges are just not up to par.

When I was much younger, I was a tutor. And among my students was a boy who could not even write his own name.

He would copy what was written on the board, complete with the ‘n’ that looked like a ‘h’. He was not writing his name. To him, it was just a “drawing” that he was trying to copy.

I had to tell his parents I was not the right teacher for their son. He needed to go back to kindergarten, but he was preparing for his Sijil Rendah Pelajaran (SRP), as it was called then.

He was 15 and had had nine years of schooling. But he did not know how to read or write. How sad is that?

Now that the SRP’s replacement – the PT3 exam – has been scrapped, we could be looking at more such boys and girls. Illiterates could be walking into the SPM examination halls at the age of 17.

As Wan Maizura said, it is already happening. With school-based assessments, it could get worse.

“This lying about the kids’ abilities has been going on for years. All teachers do it,” says a recently-retired teacher I know.

It must stop, cries Universiti Putra Malaysia lecturer Othman Talib.

“If left unchecked, I fear this phenomenon will become a disease.”

Disease? No, it has long become a pandemic, and is now endemic in our system.

The teachers have little choice. With public exams, it was up to the students. But with school-based assessment, the teacher’s KPI – and future – is at stake.

“The data must look good or the teacher will be deemed to have failed,” says Othman.

He says the academic proficiency system, where teachers have to key in reports repeatedly, is to blame. And it’s something that’s only done in Malaysia.

We may talk about following the examples of countries like Finland that have scrapped exams, but it won’t do to just ape their systems without their infrastructure.

In the first place, do we have the right manpower? I know of many teachers who loved to teach, to impart knowledge and to see their students grow into giants.

But those were teachers of the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, a multiracial group we called “sir”, “madam” and “cikgu”.

It was before the time of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad or Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

Is our teaching force now of the same ilk? And is there too many of one ethnic group now?

Even the National Union of the Teaching Profession Malaysia president Aminuddin Awang has his fears. He says the school-based assessment could lead to elements of bias, favouritism and fraud.

The former teacher I talked to agrees. Fraud and bias, he says, are very common.

Still, the experienced SPM examiner says the new, school-based assessment system could actually be a good thing if it can be made to work.

However, that depends on the teachers who, for now, just have too much else to do.

Schools have apparently received orders from the higher-ups that no student should get lower than Grade 3 (with Grade 1 being the best and Grade 5 the worst).

The idea is that teachers have to work on the weaker students to ensure that they get better. They need to guide, coach and whip the students into shape so they get that Grade 3 – and then write up reports about their progress.

But few teachers have time to do that, what with all that clerical work they have and the heavy syllabus they have to complete.

It’s far easier to just give the undeserving kids the grades and get on with their lives. Better yet, teachers who give their students good grades get rewarded with “Best Teacher” awards, and their KPI is met.

“I know of kids who passed without even coming to school,” says the ex-teacher, speaking of agriculture classes where teachers themselves help students complete their projects and give everyone a passing mark.

Hey presto, 100% passes and an award for the teacher too.

Even tests done by external examiners, like oral language exams, can be easily fixed. Back in the day, examiners from one school went to another and had to test every student.

Now, he says, only a handful are tested from each proficiency group. “Schools may need to send two or three ‘E’ students and ‘F’ students or something like that.”

Teachers know the right students to send to be tested by the external examiners. When the examiners are satisfied, the teachers can go back to giving them the grades that they wish to.

After all, it’s school-based assessment. And what they say goes. Meanwhile, the education standard goes down the drain.

And the future of our children suffers.