A primary school teacher claims she received an SMS containing a set of questions for the English paper in the UPSR primary school examinations before the exam took place last week.

Pathma (not her real name) - who was also an invigilator at the exams - had initially thought the questions in the text messages she received last Thursday from a colleague were merely forecast questions.

leaked upsr english question handphone sms 190908 “But the next day, on Sept 11, when I went to invigilate the English paper exam, I found that the questions in my handphone and the questions that appeared in the English paper were exactly the same,” said Pathma, who is based in the Klang Valley.

According to Pathma, who has been a teacher for three years, Section A of the ‘composition part’ of the English paper instructs the pupils to construct a sentence from a set of 10 chosen words.

Checking with the SMS she had received earlier, she found that it contained the precise same words as the question in the paper.

Similarly, Section B of the paper instructs the pupils to describe the activities depicted by three pictures.

leaked questions in sms 190908 “The SMS had stated in advance the activities so that the pupils could already start thinking in advance about which words to use,” said Pathma.

Section C, on the other hand, instructed the 12-year-old pupils to write paragraphs using pre-determined words.

“The SMS spelled out the three sets of about two dozen words that would appear in the exam so the pupils would know what to write on. It turned out to be true,” said Pathma.

Science paper leaked too

Pathma added that a colleague who teaches Science in another primary school received an SMS that specified the questions that would come out in the Science paper of the examination.

“I had heard about the leaks of examination papers before, but this is the first time I saw it for myself in the three years I have been teaching,” she said.

upsr english paper 190908 “These SMSes may also have reached teachers in tuition centres. Leaks such as this suggests that education system is completely corrupt and there is a lack of security in the national-level examination.

“If there were some who could buy the questions beforehand, then it means some children could perform better than others no matter how little they studied,” she added.

Pathma also said it would not be so bad if only sets of forecast questions were leaked as pupils could never be certain which questions would actually appear in the examinations.

“In this case, however, those very same questions in the SMS were the ones that the pupils were asked in the exam,” she said.

Last year, the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate (LPM) investigated an incidence whereby the questions provided by tuition and school teachers during their classes turned out to be the exact same questions that came out in the UPSR examinations.

LPM director Mohammad Zakaria Mohd Noor said the findings of its preliminary investigation into that incident had determined the similarities were only a “coincidence”.