I read in the media yesterday that certain officials in the ministry of education mentioned that if English is to be made a compulsory pass subject for the SPM, more than 130,000 students will be without an SPM certificate because apparently this is the number of students that fail the English subject yearly, going by past statistics.

These students also constitute about a third of the total students who sit for the SPM exam. What is implied is that English should not be made a compulsory pass.

But that is exactly why English should be made a compulsory subject to pass at the SPM level. Imagine, a third of those who sit for SPM cannot even pass the English paper when the passing mark is already set so low.

Some people told me that the passing mark can be set as low as 30, depending on how the marking curve is shifted. If that is the case, and if passing mark is raised to 60 (as in the case during our time), then I suspect, maybe 60% of all candidates who sit for the SPM examination will fail the English subject.

This is precisely why English must be made a compulsory subject. Granted, weakness in teaching the subject must be brushed up. As a remedy to the poor teaching of English, we can employ foreign teachers to come to teach English.

If we let this trend of poor English continue unchecked and close our eyes to this serious problem, this problem would only overwhelm us in future.

Examinations are a tool to assess the general standard of the students studying a subject. This tool enables us to gauge the effectiveness of our teaching processes and programmes, as well as the quality of our teachers.

If the assessment tells us that something is very wrong in the teaching of a certain subject, we must immediately adopt measures to overcome the problem, instead of sweeping it under the carpet, or worse still, lower the passing standard.

By lowering the passing standard, we may have a lot of passes, but it really defeats the purpose of having the examination in the first place. It is like someone making bicycles with square wheels as this someone does not know how to make round wheels.

So at the end of the day, he still makes 100 bicycles as required, but these 100 bicycles cannot even be ridden since they don't have round wheels. Instead of trying to teach him how to make round wheels, we allow him to continue to make square wheels, just to make up the number of bicycles produced.. Is this the right way?

It is like workmen putting square pegs in round holes since they do not know how to make round pegs. In the end, the whole structure collapses since anything made with square pegs in round holes will not be stable.

It is like when your doctor tells you that one-third of your lung has cancer and he needs to remove the affected parts.

You tell him that you will have only two-thirds of your lung left after the operation and because of that you object to having the one-third of the affected lungs removed - only to find yourself dead from cancer in three months' time because by then, the cancer has eaten up the whole lung.

As I see it, we must acknowledge this serious problem in the English subject and try to strengthen the teaching if it by getting qualified people to teach. Instead of allowing foreign workers to come and work in the stalls, we should try to get a few thousand English teachers to come and teach English.

At the same time, we must make English a compulsory subject so that students will be motivated to take the subject seriously .Only by doing so, can we really bring down the failure rate in English from 130,000 to a manageable level.

Be more farsighted and at the end of a decade, I am sure we can slowly crawl back to be being respectable again in our English standard. The same argument can be given to our education system as a whole, as well as so many other things in our civil service..

Tackle problems head-on and do not sweep everything under the carpet. Above all, do not lower the standard to make mediocrity look like excellence. It will only be like cutting off the nose to spite the face.