Say No to Exam

I vote for NO to exam!!!

Is this public exam necessary?  What is a big hu ha of getting straight A's for exam?  Will this exam prepare them for the future? If it does, I bet it's minimal.

Exam kills creativity, exam conforms to uniformity, exam kills passion,  exam is soooo last year!!!!!!!

Exam produces robot, do we want robot for our future generation?  What we should focus is developing a person's true potential.  Someone who does not do well in exam, does not mean she's hopeless, maybe her interest is not there, maybe she is capable to do other great things but we will never know as our education is very examination based.  So this type of person will lose out in our education system and hence jeopardizing her future.

Gone were the days when teachers were our first-hand information, we went 'oooh aaah' discovering new things from them,  learning was fun then because we indeed learn something new in school, we will lose out so much if we don't go to school but today you can get information anywhere and everywhere at the tips of your fingers, so why do we need to test them on what they learn in school when they have learned so much more outside which is possibly more relevant to what they want to pursue in future.

What we need to focus on is creativity, get the kids to produce, design or create some things new, some thing special, some thing extraordinary, do practical things rather than theory.  We need to produce more rounded teachers, teachers that can teach more than what it is now, teachers who are dancers, writers, cheerleaders, poets, actors, chef, web designers, conductors, technician rather than the 'chalk and talk' teacher.  I bet there will be more people interested to become teachers if we offer these things to them.  We get teachers who are passionate of their jobs because they are doing things they love.  Not people who choose teaching as their last resort.   There's a saying 'there is no such thing as lousy students, only lousy teachers'. Only with well rounded teachers, we are able to produce well-rounded students.

I believe if we embrace this paradigm shift, we have less problematic students, we will have happier teachers and happy teachers will create a happy environment to mould  happy students who just love to go to school.  As today's schools do not function as the only knowledge centre and as I mentioned earlier,  kids today can get any information they want as easy as 'A, B C' and  the teachers role is to guide them not to test them.

Some things need to be changed with our education system and I go for NO to exam!!!  How irony a teacher myself  does not believe in exam?  The truth is I've seen many of my students who are super talented but sadly they are not in their teachers good book just because they are different and they do not do well in exam.  In our education system, if you excel in other things rather than academic, you will not go far.  There is not much support in our education system for other things besides academic.  What is sadder is these co-curricular activities (the things that they love to do) often take the back seat once they are in Form 3 and Form 5 just because they want to stay focus on their major exam.  Not because they want too but their parents told them to do so.

I am blessed with potential students, it is sad that we gauge their achievement only by how well they do in their exam. 

Mind you I am not all against exam, students still need to be assessed so that they advance to the next level and assessment or evaluation creates a sense of responsibility and awareness but it should be done school based not the major exam that we have now!!! Public exam for Year 6, Form 3 and 5 is just too much!!!

P/S - To my third former students, if you are reading this, you still have to sit for your PMR exam and it means so much to me if you score all A's in this exam, so stop wasting your time going online and reading this post. Go and study because you people have less than 2 months before the exam (58 days to be exact)!!!