THE announcement by the Education Ministry to decentralise the Form 3 (PT3) exam starting from 2018 is extremely disappointing news. This policy to decentralise our national exams will destroy our education system and produce the disastrous outcomes we are observing in other decentralised education systems like the United States where students from middle class and upper middle class households who have the resources and privileges to attend better schools continue to outperform their peers from the working class and poor households. This disparity is widely exacerbated in the US because schools, rather than the state, have the power to assess the students.

When this power is given to schools, the quality of education in the nation is determined by the schools rather than by the centralised and standardised national exams.