16/07/2022
Our view on this trend of tough question persisting in PSLE exams is it is a fact that MOE needs tough questions to sieve out the better students from the average for the purpose of school allocation.
I noted that one interesting comment that such questions are "few and far in between". How is that so when 15% of the questions fall under this category?
Let's do some Math. The ratio of Challenging : Normal questions is 15 : 85. When simplified it becomes 3 : 17, or 1 : 5.67. so every 5+ questions, there shall be one Challenging question. It is quite a big proportion if you ask any student.
When two mathematics educator who answered the FAQs opined that "close to two third of the conhort were able to partially or completely solve them”. I wonder where they draw this conclusion. And what is the percentage of students who could actually "completely" solve them. I reckon that percentage would actually be a lot lower. Being partially able to solve is a very vague term, by lumping these together with those who could completely solve the questions would be utterly misleading.
I also do not agree with one educationalist who advocates students to apply and practise the general mathematical principles and challenge themselves.” Generals principles are not enough, rather higher order thinking skills is required but found lacking in most students.
However, I fully agree with the educationalist's view that students need to "learn each by concepts and the subsequent concepts carefully, because they build on one another".
In conclusion, challenging questions are here to stay. As teachers, let's work to continuously upgrade our skills to help students achieve better outcome. As the saying goes: "Let's not pray for easy questions, but work for strength to conquer the challenging ones."
SINGAPORE — Singapore has kept a consistent standard of difficulty for the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) over the years, an official from the Ministry of Education (MOE) said, and this
