Cutting off the nose to spite the face

A third of those who sit for SPM canot even pass the  English Exam, when the passing marks are already set  so low.

By Dr. Hsu Dar Ren

I read in one of the yesterday papers (or was it day before? memory is failing, ) that certain  officials in the ministry of education mentioned that if English is to be made a compulsory pass subject in SPM, more than 130,000 students will be without SPM certificate because apparently this number of students  fails the English exam , going by past statistic.  These students  also constitute about a third of the total students who sit for the SPM exam. What is implied is that English should not be amde compulsory.

But that is exactly why English should be made a compulsory subject.

Imagine, a third of those who sit for SPM canot even pass the  English Exam, when the passing marks are already set  so low.

 Some people told me – those of you in the education field  please correct me if I am wrong- the passing marks can be set as low as 30, depending on how the marking curve is shifted. If that is the case, and if passing mark is raised to  60 (as in the case during our time), then I suspect, maybe 60% will fail the English exam.

This is precisely why English must be made a compulsory subject. Granted, weakness in teaching must be brushed up. As I have suggested in a post few days ago, we can employ foreign teachers to come  to teach English, but if we let the trend continues and close our eyes to this serious problem, this problem would only get more serious.

Examination is a tool to assess the general standard of the students studying a subject. This tool enables us we to  gauge the effectiveness of our teaching processes and programs, as well as the quality of our teachers.

If the assessment tells us that something is very wrong in the teaching a a certain subject, we must immediately adopt measures to overcome the problems, instead of sweeping it under the carpets, or worse still, to lower the passing standard.

Read more at: http://hsudarren.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face/