It was reported yesterday in an online news portal that the “Moral Paper Tweaked to make it “”Hot””. Apparently a spokesperson for the Malaysian Examination Board, speaking on condition of anonymity, rubbished claims that they made a sudden change in the format of the Moral Studies SPM examination paper for this year. The official said that they only introduced a system called Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) for 10% of the questions.
However, on the same day, the Deputy Education Minister, P. Kamalanathan said he was informed about the matter and had asked the education department to investigate and to get back to him.
Why the Malaysian Examination Board did not even bother to inform the Ministry of Education, the teachers and the students that 10% of the questions will be formatted under the HOTS system? Is this going to happen to all the other subjects as well? Why were the teachers not trained to teach the students to answer the questions in the new format?
If anything, the Moral Studies is not a good subject to start introducing the HOTS system. First, it is a subject that does not involve science or mathematics. We need the students to have thinking and analytical skills for science, mathematics and languages, as in TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Studies) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). The Moral Studies was never a subject used in any of these. Secondly, this paper is only sat by less than 40% of the student sitting for the SPM.
Most importantly, the National Education Blueprint 2013-2025, which asked for 50% of the questions in SPM to be of higher-order thinking questions by 2016, was only unveiled in September this year. How did the Malaysian Examination Board see fit to suddenly introduce 10% of the questions in the new format within two months’ time with the teachers and the students totally unaware and unprepared? What’s worse is the Minister of Education seemed to be kept in the dark and blissfully ignorant of it.
The duty of the Malaysian Examination Board is to conduct examinations as understood by all the parties concerned, not to surprise them. The teachers and the students had to be informed and to be prepared for the new format, even if it involved only 10% of the questions. I call on the Ministry of Education to order it to officially apologize and to make amends to the teachers, the parents and the students for its failure in this case.