I read with much amazement the story in The Star today, “Nadiah gets only 18 As instead”. You know, with news reports such as this, I’m afraid we may be sending out a wrong signal to future SPM candidates: “Get as many A’s as possible”. It seems like it doesn’t matter for which subjects you ace, as long as you have enough of them. The pressure piled on these students is immense. For instance, Nadiah was expected to score 19 A’s (holy smokes that’s almost twice the number of subjects I took) even before the results were released. Luckily, her results didn’t turn out that bad. In fact, they’re mind-blowing.

But the quest for strings of A’s is understandable. How often do you hear people asking “Which subjects did you get an A for?”?. Save for future employers, very few are interested in knowing which subjects you aced. Even fewer are interested in knowing what extra curricular activities you joined. There is little doubt that great emphasis is placed on scoring A’s. So much so that some tuition centers even provide ‘tips’, and claim to be able to ’spot’ or predict SPM questions accurately. I used to have friends who’d travel all the way to KL to attend a very popular tuition center. These days, ‘good’ tuition centers train students on how to tackle exam questions.

A lot of focus is put on answering the questions correctly, what keywords to use, familiarizing oneself with the question patterns, and how they are asked. Stacks of past-year papers, sample papers and worksheets are used in drilling these students. Is this what our education system was set out to be? Studying for the sake of getting as many A’s as possible in exams? How much of knowledge really went into a student’s head is questionable. To make matters worse, I’ve even heard of some ‘privileged’ schools giving students sample papers that are very much similar to the real paper, a few weeks earlier. I wonder if such practices are effective in educating the teenagers, although I don’t know how far this is true.

The ministry’s proposal to limit the number of SPM subjects a student can register is timely (Sorry, I just read that this won’t realize). Perhaps, more weightage should be given to developing a student’s leadership, thinking, interpersonal, analytical and problem-solving skills - practical skills that could be useful throughout his life, and not just during the examinations. A student’s excellent SPM achievement does not reflect any of these qualities. I’d like to mention one example (oh I love it when I talk about this; no prizes for guessing why), the Moral Education. Scoring an A1 for this subject does not make a student any ‘less immoral’ compared to students who scored otherwise. It only means that he can memorize things better. And yes, they will be quickly forgotten after the exam is over.

How practical is that? Yet, no one cares - as long as it’s an A and that’s all that matters. It’s time we placed less emphasis on scoring as many A’s as possible, and focused instead on producing more well-rounded individuals. We don’t want someone who can’t perform past the exam period. If a student obtained say, 14, or 15 A’s (not for every subject), does that mean he’s better than one who obtained a 10-straight (perfect) A’s? Sadly though, most scholarships offered are based on the number of A’s a student has. Sigh.

Note: An “A1″ here means “1A” formally. I prefer to suffix the “1″, just like the olden days.