The PSLE - Is it so difficult to see what the problem really is?

Gigamole is glad to see the discussions about childhood education shift towards the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE). To scrap or not to scrap, seems to be the focus of the debate. To Gigamole, it seems they are missing the point. An exam is necessary at the end of Primary Six. There is no doubt about this. But people are (deliberately, perhaps) forgetting that Singapore has compulsory education up to Primary Six. The PSLE is appropriately named the Primary School Leaving Examinations. The PSLE should not be anything other than a competency exam. Somewhere along the way, the Ministry of Education allowed the PSLE to morph and mutate to become the grotesque thing it now is. Currently the PSLE is an uber-competitive exam to identify top students who can be streamed into elitist schools to fuel an even more uber-elitist agenda. The banding of schools serve no other function that to feed this elitist mindset. To disband the schools is however, only a symptomatic response to the real problem, which is that as long as the PSLE remains a competitive exam, parents will relentlessly drive their children into excelling so that they will have a chance to enter elitist secondary schools.

Gigamole says that if you really want our children to have a proper educational experience and a wholesome childhood you need to remake the PSLE into just a competency exam. That's really what is only required at Primary Six. Is this so difficult to see?

We need a major rethink of our educational system.... and please do so outside of the box.

One of the areas that Singapore can be very proud of is how we have been able to make education so available to our kids, to the extent that we can say that no child will be denied a chance to go to school. In the previous generation there many capable people who had limited opportunities simply because they did not have access to education. But not anymore. Education has indeed been the great leveler for this generation. Because schooling is now accessible to every child regardless of his/her  socioeconomic background, career opportunities are limited more by abilities and skills rather than the individual's socioeconomic stratum. Likewise for gender and ethnicity.

But sadly this appears true only to a certain degree.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) should be congratulated for making examination data available to the public. One wishes though that they would put up more detailed data, and not only cherry picked information for public consumption.

The recent data is quite instructive. They are really quite similar to previous years' data and therefore really doesn't say anything new. True, there are some wiggly movements in percentages, but they are relatively small changes. Over a long period one can see that the performance data is relatively stable. Boringly stable. This stability is actually both comforting and alarming. Comforting because it means the MOE has done an excellent job in providing education. Not much more to do. Alarming because despite all this effort, fixed disparities in educational performances between ethnic groups are apparent.

If we look at the performance at the Primary School Leaving Examinations,we see more than 90% of students pass the exams. But only the Chinese outperform the national average. The Malay students, as a group, under-perform everyone else.

This ethnic ranking not only persist at the O-levels, but the differences are markedly accentuated. And this is for 5 O-level passes. I am quite sure if we set more stringent criteria, even greater differences can be demonstrated.

This is alarming because the data is not improving despite what the amount of resources the MOE has put into the school system. I am sure the MOE is aware of this problem. But I hope they are not ignoring it. Something drastic needs to be done because the current models are not working.

To an outsider, looking at the data, such 'fixed' differences suggest a number of possibilities:
a] Our delivery of education has ethnic biases;
b] Our way of assessing has ethnic biases;
c] Ethnic biases exist in both instruction and assessment; or
d] There are real ethnic related limitations in abilities.

Since I do not subscribe to there being biologically and ethnically related limitations in ability, it must be that the first three are valid.

The MOE must spare no effort to get to the bottom of this problem. It must not rest on the laurels of its past accomplishments. There are unintended ethnic biases in how education is delivered to the public as well as ethnic biases in how the examinations are set. It is not adequate to congratulate ourselves on the performance at a national level, because this is invariably defined by the performance of the largest and most successful ethnic group. This is unfair to the minority groups who may have unaddressed special needs and considerations.

We need to remodel our educational paradigm to level the playing field for all ethnic groups.

Marking examinations on a curve..... major pitfalls

It is a common practice for examinations to be 'marked on a curve'. There are clear advantages to such a practice, and I am sure the recent PSLE have been 'marked on a curve'.

One of the major advantages of marking on a curve, is that the average grades become pretty stable year after year, regardless of fluctuation in examination difficulty. It is common in such a system to see examination questions get more difficult and challenging as teachers introduce novel questions, often in responseto increasing ability of students to 'game' the examination.

Looking at the annual average scores will not reveal the changing difficulty level of the examination questions.

The average rates of passes for the PSLE for example remain flat through the years. This 'flatness' is boring..... but great for the MOE Annual Report.

The inherent problem here, one which is seldom recognized, is that such statistics play tricks on sub-group analysis. Let me explain....

You can see from the figure, that the Chinese students perform admirably, in fact above national averages. This is perhaps because they are best able to 'game' the PSLE exams. Because they do so well and are numerically the biggest contributor to the national average, their results essentially 'drive' the national average. And in fact determine the difficulty of the exam. As their performance improves, the pressure for the examination board (Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board) is to increase the difficulty of the exam. But you do not see this because the national average, being determined by a normalizing curve, remains identical year after year.

But what of the other sub-groups e.g. Malays and Indians? Their numbers being numerically smaller (much smaller) than the Chinese data are essentially numbers that are relative to the major sub-group, i.e. the Chinese data.

Therefore, an apparent decline in achievement of a non-Chinese sub-group, is not necessarily a decline in standards, but merely a decline in achievement relative to the Chinese sub-group. In reality, the absolute performance of all sub-groups may actually be improving. But these improvements are not visible, and tragically, not recognized.

One can speculate about why the Chinese sub-group does so well....but my guess is that they have better access to resources which help prepare them for exams and make them better at 'gaming' the examination.

By contrast, the GCE 'O' level examination is set by the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate (UCLES) do not experience the same problem. This is because, the standards are determined by the UCLES and all our ethnic groups are relatively small components of the total numbers. Here you can see overall standards improving and the pass rates for the Malay students, often regarded as poor performers, possibly improving the most rapidly of the ethnic groups.

Why is this important?

Well..... I think it is extremely important for educators to recognize that there is a critical difference between telling students they are always doing worse every year no matter how hard they try, and encouraging them by recognizing that they are actually performing better every year, though perhaps not improving as rapidly as others. The former discourages and creates and sense of despondency and helplessness, while the latter is inherently affirming and encourages the community to do better.