KUCHING: Malaysia needs to move away from an examination-oriented education system which is considered a ‘silent killer’ for the country in the future.
Deputy director-general of the Ministry of Education (Education Operations) Datuk Sufa’at Tumin said an examination-oriented education system, which has been practised all this while would not be able to produce a ‘balanced’ future generation.
According to him, under the examination-oriented education system, there was no guarantee that students who produced 9A+ in public examinations would have the spirit of patriotism and unity when they were older, which at the end of the day would destroy the country.
“Maybe, many are not aware that emphasis on examination alone is a ‘silent killer’ because it will not be able to produce students who are holistic in nature. The system will not be able to produce students who are outstanding in academic and possess high personality value.
“This can only be done through school-based assessment (PBS), which not only assesses students in terms of academic but also emotional, physical and spiritual,” Sufa’at said when closing the Malaysian District Education Office Transformation with the School Managers Conference 2014 here yesterday.
Considering that PBS will be able to produce a highly balanced future generation, he urged educators and parents to support its implementation instead of calling for it to be
abolished.
“We cannot abolish PBS when we are facing constraints. We must think of the future. We may not be used to it at first. It took Hong Kong 11 years for them to stabilise the (PBS) system.”
Sufa’at said the weakness of PBS, which was implemented three years ago for secondary schools, was not an excuse for the system to be abolished. Instead, he said efforts must be made to find ways to improve and facilitate its implementation.
“We cannot assume that when there is no examination system, the education system will be finished. This is a wrong assumption. If this system continues to be implemented, the (education) culture (in our country) will just be based on examinations.
“(When this happens), students will just study and go for tuition only to face the examination but what about the educational aspect of it?”
He said the PBS system would also give emphasis on examinations and would come in the form of ‘assessment through learning and teaching trough assessment’. The system would also give emphasis to the development of students from the beginning and not at the end when they were sitting for public examinations.
Sufa’at said assessment was not something new in the education system as it happened every time when the teachers were teaching.
He also called on parents not to be worried about the implementation of PBS because under the system, every student’s achievement would be explained in detail and not only the grades.
State Education director Datu Abdillah Adam and Malaysian School Managers Association (PPSM) president Hussin Mustafa were among those present at the function.
During the function, the resolution made during the conference was presented to the Education Ministry through Sufa’at.