Singapore abolishes school exam rankings (2018)
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EDIT: Why would you want to have children compete with each other on learning abilities? How does it help anyone? If a child is going to take a tad bit longer to understand than another child, I would rather the child take a bit longer to master than force the child to acquire the knowledge within a set duration. If they score 90% of the marks would you be happy that they scored 90% or unhappy that they could not master the remaining 10% and will never be given a second chance to do so? And what if your child crosses the passing marks of say 40%? Would you be happy that your child scraped through with passing marks or be unhappy that it never got that extra time to learn the remaining 60%? Not every child has the same grasping power. And by making learning a competition you are taking away the right to learn from a majority of these young children.
I would rather the child compete with others on what it has learnt on a practical basis rather than theoretical! Currently, scores only determine how much of the theory the child has been able to master. There is no process that examines how that theoretical knowledge has been used effectively throughout the lifespan of the learner which is actually more important.
Let them learn at the pace they are comfortable with. By making sure more children are properly educated we will, as a society, automatically reap the benefits of their future contributions. With competition, you are restricting the scope to the "gifted few" who will then have to bear the burden of the rest.
I never performed too well on those (all the International Math/Physics/Informatics Olympiads), but I did love them!
On the other hand, the final-leaving exams were weird. So much stakes on a single test, everybody nervous about it, some questions really obtuse, others seemed too easy, and then you read that some colleges want you to be in top percentile to get in, and I am like "go make your own admission test you lazy ..." ...
Some of the teachers give back tests in grade order, allegedly to value the bests, but it has a bad impact on the less advanced kids. And comparing to each other is the norm.
Regardless, France education system is bad rated comparing to other countries...
It is very disparaging to pupils to imply that if they "are not good" it's just because of their abilities. The message should be first and foremost that they can do it if they try hard.
There is a difference between the message "you can do better if you try harder" and the message "you can do everything if you try harder".
The first is a good life lesson, the second is self-help books marketing.
This way of thinking infect society and then we have to read things, normally wrote by millionaires, like "everyone can be rich". I suppose that it's the equivalent to "every country can be a net exporter at the same time" thinking in economics.
Education should be about understanding how the world works, so, it should be also about understanding your limits. We would save in neurosis treatments.
Call me an optimist but I believe that the overwhelming majority of children have the abilities to have good grades if they are pushed and kept motivated.
I think there is a kind of dichotomy between pushing and motivation and, very frequently, we forget to search the reason why there is not motivation and we only push.
The reason there is not enough motivation is because of competition. Let us go with a hypothetical scenario: You have a child who is weak in physics and good in chemistry and I have a child who is weak in chemistry and good in physics. They are friends and yet are also competitors. Do you think your child has any incentive to help my child get better at chemistry and my child has any incentive to help your child get better at physics? There is no incentive because competition at an individual level discourages team work and knowledge sharing. Mainly because this kind of competition is constrained by "Time". The only way our children can reduce the learning gap is by approaching the teacher, taking external tuitions or try to find the relevant material on the net (and do all this before the date of the examination). The teacher is unfortunately already overburdened (the country I come from is extremely competitive and the ratio of teachers to students is 1 to 40 and in some cases 1 to 70 or even 1 to 100). Very few can afford after-school tuitions. And tuitions is an extremely inefficient way to close the learning gap. It is obvious the child loses motivation to learn when encountered with such an environment where it has very few choices.
Now remove competition from the equation and our children have all the incentive to share unique perspectives on how they were able to gain knowledge with each other. This reduces burden on the teacher as well! It would move the needle from "time-bounded competition" to "cooperative competition not bound by time". It isn't like it doesn't exist already! Take gaming as an example: It is competitive and cooperative at the same time. Friends help each other get better at the game by sharing tips and tricks and then compete on equal footing. It is addictive for this very reason. Schooling is not addictive because there is no short-term benefits the child can get for all the effort it puts into. Even much less when it comes to sharing knowledge with peers. Even us adults are rewarded almost immediately for the work we put in. Where is such an incentive for children? There is none. Ranking is not equivalent by any measure. Ranking is not money. It doesn't bring any pleasure. If your child tops the class you think its peers will be proud of your child's achievements? It creates and develops all negative traits: jealousy, animosity, dejection, depression and arrogance; depending on which side of the coin the child falls under.
Expertise on the other hand is the best incentive. There is no greater satisfaction for the child than knowing that it has understood the subject matter completely. It will encourage it to study the subject further and tackle more complex topics. We should be striving for expertise not relative ranking.
Along the same lines, why punish someone for being in a class with another competent kid?
As for worries about places in further education, it's easy to make things hard enough that your lecture halls aren't stuffed. Doesn't require you to rank everyone.
I think I'd have learned a lot more if everything had been pass/fail. Not just because it's easy to get to the pass line, but also that I'd challenge myself more with more advanced stuff.
I think there’s much more potential for bias when every position is just based on some committee’s prerogative in a way that is very difficult, if not impossible to measure.
I think there’s usefulness to some sort of statistically standardized test that is a good mix in to the many other factors that should be used- essays, activities, awards, interviews, referrals.
I think it’s bad when a test is given too much weight, but if we don’t have any standards with the goal of being objective then I fear only attractive people will get into the best colleges.
searching on the topic, all i find is articles that consider drop-out rates a serious problem, and statictics like this one: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... that shows that rates dropped from 17% to 12% over 15 years.
based on that i highly doubt that any place is using dropout rates as an intentional strategy.
Learning should be about wanting to acquire knowledge, not being forced into it like tuna in a tuna can factory.
but what is the alternative? every university employing their own tests would mean that students now have to prepare for multiple tests based on where they apply.
a job interview system? lot's of bias and unfairness in that too.
in germany school prestige is irrelevant for the university selection process, only the raw grades matter. so actually your best chance to get good grades would be to pick a school that has a tendency to give students better grades.
however if those statistics are not known, as they won't be now in singapore (and i don't know if they are in germany) then your school choice is either random (with respect to learning outcome) or based on perceived reputation of being a "hard" or "easy" school.
there are a number of other statistics that probably need to be suppressed too, such as the number of students that get into university from each school.
Not necessarily. In many EU countries that I am familiar with, there is a standardised, country-wide test which all universities use as their main admission method and which is managed by an entity independent of high schools. Note that this is different from continuous testing throughout the duration of the program. Still, some universities administer their own admission tests in addition because you can't force the university to use only a single scoring method (well, you can't, but it's not necessarily a good idea).
Even so, each university solely administering their own admission tests is how it used to work in the past and it worked rather well, despite being a bit more cumbersome. In the end, if you had real knowledge, it didn't matter that you had to take a few different tests.
> a job interview system? lot's of bias and unfairness in that too.
This does not matter. It just means each business is responsible for its own hires and the only one suffering from a bad hiring process is the business itself. If certain employee qualities lead to an objectively better work performance (and there are surely such qualities), the process will very quickly correct itself to detect those qualities.
It's hard to tell without more context, but it sounds to me like you're conflating criteria based on grades (which are continuously accumulated throughout your schooling years) and admission/certification tests which are only administered once, at the moment you are trying to attain some certificate. My position is that the former is a bad thing, but the latter is necessary and closer to testing the thing that matters: your final abilities.
education should be available to everyone. the only requirement to enter any level of education should be to have passed the previous level.
as for grades vs test, i haven't much thought about that at all. i was merely reporting on how the german system works, without necessarily believing that it is the best system. all these systems are flawed in some way, and in the long run i believe the only system that will work is the one that allows everyone to access university level education.
with more and more university level material becoming available online for free this will eventually become reality. we just need to figure out a way to scale learning and teaching process
The solution is to write a harder test that is only meant for the top 10% of students to take and actually contains harder questions.
There are awesome resources like Khan Academy that have unlimited spots. But with top schools there are limitations to size based on teachers, city spaces, etc.
University is a finite resource.
Also known as education inflation.
i don't agree that more university students devalue universities however. on the contrary, more university level education is in my opinion the best response to less jobs and automation.
we need ever greater and greater parts of our society in higher education to study, research and teach, because all the low level jobs will eventually be automated away.
but imagine what our society can do if we are all educated to the level of a college professor. with more educated people we can address issues such as pollution and climate-change much more easily, and this can only speed up the advancement of our society.
this grade would be different every year because it depended on the grades of the students that actually applied. so while in highschool i was not able to compare myself to my peers nor was i able to evaluate my changes of getting into university. (other than obviously noting that the lower my grades, the lower my chances)
as it happened, the year before the cut-off was on a lower grade that suggested that i'd make it in if it stays the same the next year, but when i applied, more students with higher grades applied too, and my grades ended up being not good enough.
The idea was that when I was in college, I found a lot of students avoiding the electives where they would learn a lot, in favor of electives where it was easier to get good grades.
The good part was that we could push them extremely hard. There's a point where most of them feel like it's not the right career choice and we can push them past that plateau. Since a lot of them are doing it at night and weekends, they don't always have a lot of willpower or commitment. The drop out rate is a little lower than expected.
The bad part is that they don't push themselves hard enough. A lot of the difficulty is in things that they can just grind through - loops, arrays, functions, conditionals. But they don't work hard enough at it, and don't become 'literate' enough to solve some basic problems.
The other downside is that a diploma sells certification, and not necessarily education. Something that's easy to pass is 'not recognized', even if the students learn more in the end.
Remember Singapore has a notorious education system of sending children in different tracks at an age as early as 8. That is, in your 3rd year in primary school, you'll sit an exam that would probably determine your life trajectory.
If you do well, you'll be enrolled in better programs, better school and would go to college. If you don't, you'll be wrapped up and sent to classes with little resources and guidance and often times incompetent teachers, and what's more, you would not be qualified to sit an college entrance exam, which means, the best you can achieve is Polytechnic schools. In singapore's caste system, a Polytechnic student is at the very bottom.
The intention and justification of this system is that people are born with different levels of intelligence. To allow all people to have a college education is not merely a waste of resources, but also not useful and meaningful for those who are just average.
How do people cope with this system, well, rich people can either hire tutors or have mother work as full time educator(often in case when the mother is highly educated). Their children would win out in that race at age of 8 and would continue to win and would go to the same several elite high schools, which ends in a situation where the transportation minister has never taken public transportation ever in his/her life.
The children are still graded. Grading, or at least its interpretation, depends on the students performance. How is this not a competition?
competition matters when there is something scarce to win. but if we apply that to education we already have a problem, because education should not be scarce. hence competition is not the right way to decide who should get access to it.
it also will hurt them in the long run at work. while in many companies employees do compete, these kind of workplaces are always toxic and not a good place to work at.
in a good workplace people cooperate, and that is something they need to learn in school.
school has conflicting goals, you need to help develop both kid with interest in learning and kid that would spend their time in other activities but need to reach the same goals nonetheless
this is definitely not about self improvement.
Well, even when we learn to read and write, and learn maths, is that not self-improvement? Do we learn this things because they are beneficial and useful in our lives; or is it just a matter of achieving the highest score?
When you write things on this forum; is your only motivation to receive the most upvotes and get the highest score?
Just because something is useful to society, doesn't mean that it will have no use for ourselves, does it?
Indeed, if you don't use some kind of authority towards students, you won't be able to teach them things that they can't see the point in at all.
The question is whether we (as teachers / as society) choose to use tests and authority to motivate them by fear; or to try to entice their interest in the subjects; or if something is genuinely not interesting then perhaps just not force that it upon students at that particular time.
My favourite teachers have had an radiant enthusiasm for what they were teaching, and could make almost anything interesting. On the other hand, some teachers manage to make even the most exciting subjects dull.
so the question is what drives my choices? for one I can derive a lot of wealth out of my knowledge. on the other hand there's the pride of accomplishment.
but if I had to generalize I say lot of people around me just have an utilitarian approach to knowledge, and they won't deepen their unless enticed or coerced.
beside I can't see people getting around and just learn stuff outside what's in their interest to begin with, me included, didn't and won't care to learn ancient languages and those lesson at school were just a chore
note that I think of it heading also has another purpose, to let parents know efficiently if these any hiccup in some courses. how held would parents know where their kid needs help? sure there's the semestral parent-teacher meeting but that seems inefficient and too coarse compared to punctual grading
or any country from 3rd world country can afford hiring silicon valley graduates at $300k per year just for a senior to tech lead level position?
In fact, I think it's quite common scenario in a lot of solitary pursuits, be it intellectual or artistic. Without the immediate ability to compare, you can spend years doing something without being rewarded for it at the end - for example, Hitler spend a decade trying to be a painter, before he finally owned his failure and switched to politics. If there was a way to get reliable feedback in painting without putting a decade of work into it, he might've had abandoned it much earlier and not grow his resentment towards "the gatekeeping Jews".
Similarly, scoring higher in your next exam doesn't actually indicate that you have fixed the problems you had during your previous examination. If you actually want to improve, you need to review your own results and find out where you failed and what to correct.
people all age react to compliment and scoldings, grades are just a synthetic alternative