SEPTEMBER 19 — Ah, exams.
I remember them: the initial panic upon realising that they are important and might determine the rest of one’s life, the revelation upon “revision” that much of what was learnt in class was in fact irrelevant (or perhaps one was not always paying the best of attention), the various attempts to condense a year’s worth of material into a single acronym or mnemonic, the jitters upon entering the over air-conditioned exam hall, the trepidation of opening the first page of the paper and finding that the available questions were on the topics that had been least “revised”, the expiration of ink precisely when a brilliant answer had come to mind, and then the agonising wait for the results, which could not only strain friendships (“you only got a B?!”, actually meaning “how stupid can you be?!”) and disappoint parents, but also shatter long-held personal dreams.
Fortunately, I managed to scrape through by repeatedly getting the lowest possible marks that translated into sufficiently respectable grade classifications to advance to my next academic destination, and I am glad that formal exams are for me a thing of the past.
Naturally, everyone’s exam experiences are different, and one’s approach to exams will change over time, too. The sequence I described above probably applied most during A-Levels, but from my conversations with young Malaysians there are certainly many similar scenarios. Now most students, if telling the truth, might admit to bending the rules a bit — writing an acronym on one’s hand, or perhaps more drastically concealing a useful crib sheet in one’s socks to refer to during a well-timed toilet break.
Leaking a full exam paper, however, represents cheating of a different magnitude. This requires collusion, abuse of power, exchange of resources, breaking the law and above all subversion of the basis of academic exams: that they are meant to assess the aptitude of individuals in a cohort on an equal basis.
Of course, there are some who argue that, in the Malaysian context, leaking doesn’t make much difference because exams are all about regurgitation anyway. Indeed, my young cousin claims that they are usually so insultingly easy: perfectly rewriting the stock answers memorised in class will result in full marks, he declares with unabashed confidence. Then you have the problem of grade inflation, and employers who say that so-called “top scorers” are still not good enough.
These are very pertinent points, but they do not detract from the immorality of leaking exam papers, where the intention is to give certain students a massive advantage in an assessment that is ostensibly about merit.
Arguments about how best to assess students abound everywhere v starting from fundamental questions like what education is for (whether to fill children with knowledge for its own sake or explicitly to prepare them for future careers, possibly a tool in a greater plan for social engineering) — but if we are going to have exams as a central plank of our education system, then we must ensure that they are free from corruption (and, in light of other reports, racism). When I was at school one big debate was about getting the right balance between exams on one hand and coursework on the other — and now we have the School Based Assessment (SBA) system to replace some annual exams, which has been broadly supported, but implemented with some bumps over the past three years.
However, there is another way to combat over-reliance on centralised exams: decentralise them. In some federal countries, like Germany, Australia and India, aspects of education policy are devolved, meaning that entrance requirements, types of schools and the exam contents can differ from state to state. In some subjects there may be variation of syllabi too — for example, to emphasise the unique history of a particular region.
Multiple exam boards can arise even when federalism is absent. In the United Kingdom, schools — independent and state-funded — can choose between different exam boards for every subject at GCSE and A-Level. These boards are regulated by an independent body (reporting directly to parliament, not a ministry), but otherwise there is competition, enabling headmasters to select the configurations that best suit the children of their school. This is more likely to reflect what parents want than a centralised exam board producing papers that all schools have to offer.
The other bonus about having competing exam boards is that should there ever be a leak, at least only students sitting papers from that exam board would be affected, instead of the entire academic cohort in the country. Market forces would then penalise that exam board for incompetence, instead of blame being unproductively ascribed to politicians or civil servants, with little guarantee of change.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
