Exams no longer final word on assessment?

Much appreciation to Firdaus, who in the comments of Kian Ming's post on the new Deputy Education Minister pointed us to the news that the UPSR and potentially PMR and SPM too will no longer be the last word on pupils' performance. This is a dramatic change in our education system, and it seems to be new Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin's attempt to make his mark.

Unfortunately, I don't think we have enough information on this policy change to draw conclusions regarding its worthiness. In the abstract, it's a good enough idea: the notion that two or three exams should forever define your school years is ridiculous, because even in our mostly dreary education system, you get so much out of school beyond just knowing how to pass exams.

But even when I was in school, it was understood that the UPSR, PMR and SPM were not the be-all and end-all: you had to do well on the tests and exams routinely meted out in school too. Of course, they weren't as important as the big three — I actually failed a couple of tests when I was in school, and it didn't ruin my life — but you were expected to do well because they were basically dry runs for whatever exam the school was prepping you for. In primary school, tests and exams were dry runs for the UPSR; in secondary school, they became preparation for the PMR and SPM.

So if the new policy is just incorporating these tests and exams into the final assessment, then not much really changes. The assessment is still fundamentally testing only one trait: how well you can take the exams designed by the Education Ministry. Unless you change how we actually design the exams, this is purely a cosmetic change. The only useful and meaningful difference will be that if you fall sick during a major exam, your grades won't be as bad as they were before. The assessment system will still tell us nothing about how well our pupils can think or analyse information — all it will tell us now is whether our pupils can consistently take exams and answer the preset questions correctly over the course of six years, instead of one or two months.