Dr Maszlee Malik
KUCHING: Examinations for primary one to three students will be repealed and replaced with more objective assessments beginning next year.
Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik made this announcement earlier this morning on Twitter but did not disclose further information on what these objective assessments entailed.
A poll conducted by Berita Harian within the comments of the tweets indicated that users of the platform were mostly in agreement to the development as 79 per cent of respondents agreed that the repealment of examinations in Primary 1 to 3 would be a good move.
Following this tweet, Maszlee retweeted several tweets from the official Education Ministry’s account that detailed several initiatives that his ministry is or would be undertaking in the near future.
“The ministry believes that education belongs to all and should not be narrowed to a classroom wall space, as there is a need to build a community at the same time,” he was quoted to have said in one of the retweets.
Among the initiatives mentioned were proposals for pilot programmes that would link the Education Ministry and local organisations, agencies and communities together to help curb the dropout rates among primary and secondary school children; and programmes to help empower the Malay language as our national language, official language and language of instruction.
Furthermore, the ministry also stated that they would be setting up a committee that would be tasked to help streamline and reduce the burden and responsibilities of teachers within the country.
For states, the ministry also announced that a total of 116 school development projects for dilapidated schools had been implemented in Sarawak utilising the Industralised Building System (IBS) construction method in 2018. Of these 116 projects, 67 have been completed while another 49 projects are still currently under implementation.
In Sabah, the number of dilapidated school projects in 2018 was 120 with 37 completed and the remaining 83 still under implementation.
Additionally, Maszlee also announced that all 6,636 schools that received 4Mbps bandwidth internet access under the first phase of ‘1BestariNet’ programme have been upgraded to 6Mbps, 10Mbps dan 15 Mbps based on the number of computer labs in school.