PKR has urged a review of the Form 3 Assessment (PT3) system, citing the poor results that students obtained in the examination.

 

The party’s education bureau chief Abas Awang said this is to avoid ruining the future of students who were supposed to score well but failed to do so because of the PT3 system.

 

He pointed to unconfirmed reports that only about 80 students scored straight A’s under the inaugural PT3 system, compared to the tens of thousands who scored straight A’s under the Lower Secondary Assessment (PMR) system that it replaced.

 

He attributed this to a failed policy change by the Education Ministry.

 

“The Education Ministry’s policy is clearly unclear on how are they supposed to evaluate the students’ achievements. It is from this muddled policy where poor-scoring students are produced...

 

“PT3 is an attempt to produce students with higher order thinking skills, but since their teachers are not trained to implement its teaching methods, it has caused the students to fail to master the subject that is being taught,” he said in a statement yesterday.

 

The PT3 was introduced as a school-based assessment system beginning this year, as opposed to centralised examinations under the PMR system.

 

'Unfamiliar format'

Over 450,000 candidates sat for the examination in October and its official results were released on Monday.

 

Followings this, reports emerged in various media outlets of parents and students complaining that the new examination format is unfamiliar, and they had only several months to prepare for the changes.

 

However, Parent Action Group for Education (Page) chairperson Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim said the results reflect Malaysia’s poor performance on global education rankings.

 

She also said it showed that the Education Ministry had been “overly generous’ with ‘As’ under the PMR system.

 

"If you have only 80 kids with straight A’s now, what does it tell you? It infers that they previously have been manipulating the results, lowering passing marks to give more A’s.

 

“This is false pretence, telling them they are good, when they are, in fact, not," The Malaysian Insider quoted her as saying on Thursday.