History is going to become a must-pass subject in SPM. I chose to use the term must-pass instead of compulsory, because history is already compulsory where every student have to sit for the history paper. A must-pass subject, on the other hand, means that a student cannot fail the subject, which otherwise, he or she will be deemed to have fail the entire SPM examination. At the moment, only BM (Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Malaysia - I'm not sure) is a must-pass subject.
This decision by the Ministry of Education, has been inconsistent and to a large extent, strange. Just recently, the MOE has announced that UPSR and PMR examinations will soon be abolished and the reason behind this abolishment was that the Malaysian educational system has been overly examination-oriented. Therefore, instead of having public examinations like UPSR and PMR, students in Primary Year 6 and Secondary Year 3 will be assessed by their school teachers. Although I agree that Malaysians, in general, are obsessed with scoring A's in public examinations, I do not agree for public examinations to be substituted by informal assessments to be conducted by school teachers. To me, this change is just too extreme and drastic, and Malaysians in general and teachers and educationalists in specific, are just not ready for this.
Let's return to the topic of SPM History. The de-tour into the topic of public examinations is necessary, because I want to point out an inconsistency in our educational policy decisions. While the idea behind the abolishments of UPSR and PMR was to reduce the emphasis on examinations, on the contrary, the decision to turn History into a must-pass subject in SPM is not only emphasising the importance of History but also the importance of SPM and public examinations.
In my personal opinion, the Malaysian educational system should continue to have UPSR, PMR and SPM. However, some changes are needed to make the examinations more relevant to the students as a useful evaluation for their learning and education. For example, while UPSR is the primary school-leaving examination, the focus of evaluation should be on the basic aspects such as languages and mathematics. As PMR results are generally used to stream students for upper secondary, this examination therefore should focus on evaluating and helping students to identify the latent skills needed for future education in the science, commerce or arts stream.
SPM, as the school-leaving certificate, should provide students with the flexibility to choose any 10 or 12 subjects. In addition, there shouldn't be any must-pass conditions, simply because the SPM examination as a whole is the certification that this student has completed formal schooling and SPM is by no means, a certification of expertise in any particular subjects. If the government strongly feels that BM or History are essential and important, perhaps, the must-pass condition of these subjects could be imposed upon entry into public universities or the civil service, but certainly, this should not be the reason to deny a student of a school-leaving certification.
In this issue about public examinations, we should think more universally. A student might be brilliant in mathematics and science, but fail History and/or BM. He or she will be without a SPM certificate, and therefore not only that he or she will not be able to enter tertiary education, the chances of finding a decent job are extremely slim. Perhaps he or she might just end up as a factory operator, labourer or cleaner, all because of a subject called BM or History. What a sad ending to education!
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