By Nancy Nais
KUCHING, April 29: The Ministry of Education must have a real, proper and robust system to evaluate its students who no longer need to sit for the primary school benchmark examination UPSR.
When Senior Education Minister Datuk Mohd Radzi Mohd Jidin announced yesterday that Malaysia will abolish the Ujian Penilaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) from 2021 onwards, Sarawak Federation of Chinese Associations president Dato Richard Wee regarded it as good news.
“In my view, doing away with the examination and changing it to assessment or evaluation is the right way to go. This is in order not to give our students too much pressure in facing examinations.
“This has been a practice in Western countries all these years. As the saying goes, do not let one examination determine the student’s entire education, career and fate,” Wee said when contacted.
Wee added that the ministry has been talking about abolishing UPSR for many years but it had not been very decisive about it, starting an evaluation programme instead for Primary 1 up to Primary 4.
Now that UPSR is abolished, he asserted that there must be a comprehensive way of evaluating and assessing the student’s progress such as looking at the whole year of homework, assignments and so on.
Having said that, he opined, in the context of Malaysia, if no proper system is put in place, there will be a fair bit of disparity between the urban and rural government schools.
“Once you have this kind of assessment system, you are solely pushing the responsibilities and duties to teachers and principals to make sure the school is doing it properly. The educators must be well versed in the system and know the process in-and-out so that it will not be unfair to students who are in rural schools.
“The government must also address the disparity of the kind of standards between students in rural and urban schools. This is my concern,” he added.
As for private schools, Wee felt they will have lesser problems in addressing a comprehensive assessment system.
USPR was first introduced in Malaysia in 1988.
In his announcement, Mohd Radzi also said the Form Three Assessment (PT3) will also be cancelled for this year after taking into account the time needed for students to prepare for it amidst the Covid-19 situation in the country which has shortened face-to-face learning for students.
He added that students will be assessed through school-based performance, which includes assessing them in the classroom, and via physical activities, sports, co-curriculum and psychometric criteria. — DayakDaily
