There’s no ‘school’ in school-based assessment system, says teachers’ union

The School-Based Assessment system, that will affect all government and government-aided primary and secondary schools, has come under scrutiny, with a teachers’ union calling for the system to be abolished. Students in Form 3 will be the ones most affected by the implementation of the system, the union said. – The Malaysian Insider pic, February 13, 2014.Increased truancy and apathy among school students when it comes to their lessons are among the reasons why the nation’s teachers’ union wants the new student assessment system to be abolished.

The National Union of Teaching Professions (NUTP) has claimed that none of its 180,000 members throughout the country have found anything positive in the School-based Assessment System (SBA), which was started three years ago.

NUTP president Hashim Adnan said the SBA was alien to the education culture of Malaysian students who liked having their progress measured in As, Bs and Cs. 

The union’s stand is expected to add pressure to Putrajaya after it decided to review the system, which has been implemented on Form One and Form Two students, and Primary One pupils.

Putrajaya’s decision to review the system came after a teacher’s pressure group, Suara Guru Masyarakat Malaysia, or Teacher-Community Voices Malaysia (SGMM), said it will hold a protest on February 22 to demand that the SBA be abolished.

Though the NUTP disagreed with SGMM’s plan, Hashim said their demands were similar. 

“With the SBA, there is no meaning in going to school,” said Hashim of the SBA, which has done away with annual examinations in favour of daily assessments.

The daily assessments, he said, essentially graded students based on whether they pass or fail a subject based on six band spectrum. It starts from band one “understand” (the lowest) to band six “exemplary” (the highest).

Hashim said a student who gets a band one grade is considered to have passed, but is not distinguished from a student who gets band six.

This is different from the old hierarchical grading system of A to F which separates students based on who excelled at a certain subject.

“Our students still want to strive to get that 90 or 95% mark. When they’ve not given that opportunity they feel what’s the point of studying? What’s the difference between me and the other kids? 

“Teachers are then having a problem motivating students to pay attention in class because students are easily bored.

“Students also don’t bother showing up for class because they feel they need not be graded on it later on,” Hashim told The Malaysian Insider. 

On Tuesday, Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin announced that the ministry was reviewing the SBA following widespread complaints from teachers.

The SBA was implemented in 2011 starting with Form 1 students. It is part of the government’s efforts to produce more well-rounded students instead of those who purely excelled at academics.

Teachers have complained of the vagueness in the six-band grading system and its requirement that data from student assessments have to be entered every day into a centralised computer system.

Congestion in the network has seen teachers wake up in the wee hours of the morning to enter the data due to low online traffic.

“If a teacher has 160 students, then that is 160 individual assessments she has to do each day,” said Hashim.

Previously, SGMM also claimed that weaknesses in Malaysia’s SBA led many schools to fall back on the old annual exam system to track pupils’ performance. 

SGMM wants the system abolished before it is implemented this year on Form Three students who will be sitting for the important Lower Secondary Assessment exam, or PMR.

They fear that weaknesses in its implementation and the overall confusion by a majority of teachers and school administrators on how to implement SBA would affect the Form Three students’ PMR performance.

Hashim said the emphasis on individual schools to assess their own students, as opposed to an external examiner as in the case of the old system, will open the door to manipulation of PMR results.

“So far there are no guidelines from the ministry for standardised answers (in PMR).

“No teacher or school wants their schools to be seen as a laggard. So when it comes time for the exam, what’s to stop them from passing all their students?

“Since the teachers control the assessment they can tell their students what questions there will be in the exam.”