William Ghani Bina
KUCHING: Some teachers here gave a sigh of relief yesterday when the Examination Board extended the deadline for submitting assessment data of their students from yesterday (Nov 20) to Nov 30.
The deadline was extended probably because of complaints that submitting data online had been difficult due to the unreliable servers serving the Examination Board’s school-based assessment system (or SPPBS), said a teacher here.
The teacher who did not want to be identified said the system was too slow, making it difficult to send data.
“Delivering data is a frustrating task when we teachers could not key in marks of students being assessed or send them to the board. The system was difficult to access as it was dragging and lagging. We also fear that those who missed the deadline due to this unreliable system could cause some students to fail when they are supposed to be excellent,” the irate teacher said yesterday.
He hoped the government could use a system equivalent in quality to the one facilitating Facebook for the sake of speed and efficiency.
He believed the current SPPBS was created in haste and still not 100 per cent perfect.
The teacher related that at times it took him six to seven hours to send assessment data of any one student.
In addition, the SPPBS officers-in-charge were hard to contact though they are listed on the SPPBS site, he lamented.
Meanwhile, Sarawak Teachers Union president William Ghani Bina when contacted yesterday said such complaints were valid and common nationwide.
Apart from extending the deadline, the solution should have been to add more servers for the system to be effective as there are now about 400,000 teachers from 10,000 schools catering to a total of 5.2 million students, he said.
“As STU president, I suggest to the board, Education Ministry or any ministry for that matter that, if they wanted to introduce something new or something good like SPPBS, they must first have enough servers. Giving teachers extra time is not enough,” Ghani added.
“Secondly, the ministry and the board should get all information from the respective education departments nationwide. Why from the teachers? Teachers have to wake up at 6am, take breakfast, send their own children to school and then go to work daily. The extra task for instance to submit marks of their students online, will cause unnecessary stress and pressure affecting their professional life,” he lamented.
He reasoned that most of the information is already in the school’s system when teachers submitted them via the traditional way using forms.
As such, asking the teachers to submit data online was redundant, Ghani said, adding that the schools could have passed this information to the education departments in their respective areas.
This, he said, was “a waste of time and money as far as these teachers are concerned.”
Moreover, he said, internet accessibility in rural areas was likely to be bad or slow and this would add to the stress of teachers there.