Parents complaining that the PSLE question paper is too difficult is nothing new. Every few years, there is an uproar over certain difficult questions and some parents express concerns that their children are not taught to handle these questions or that their children are becoming too stressed out by the increasingly high standards.

Following this, the Singapore Examination and Assessment Board (SEAB) will provide the usual response that there is a “judicious balance of easy, average and difficult questions”, that there is “careful consideration” to ensure “the questions are within the respective syllabus and within the pupil’s abilities and experiences” and that there are ”processes” in place to “calibrate the difficulty level of each question and to control the overall standard of the paper”.

All this has almost become routine and nothing that the SEAB doesn’t want changed ever gets changed. Yet there is a need to seriously consider the concerns of parents in a one-way education system that is structured to stream students according to their abilities. These concerns can either be indicative of parents being kiasu or of children truly being left behind. With education being so key to social mobility, such concerns must not be simply brushed aside with canned responses. Othewise, social inequality may be perpetuated.

SEAB needs to explain how it determines students’ abilities

In essence, the SEAB’s reply to the question “why are examination papers becoming more and more difficult?” is that the difficulty level of papers is pitched to the abilities of students. In other words, question papers are only becoming as difficult as students are becoming smarter. However, this raises the question of how the SEAB determines whether students are getting smarter, or in their own words, ”the pupil’s abilities and experiences”.

The SEAB needs to provide more information on the “processes” by which it determines students’ abilities. Blanket assurances will not be enough, neither will a superficial inspection of students’ abilities. The SEAB needs to look at both the abilities of students at the top as well as those at the bottom, and access whether the gap in academic ability is growing wider. This is especially important since the academic abilities of students are often tied to the incomes of their family, and the situation can only worsen as Singapore’s income inequality persists.

Education standards tied to household income levels

No matter what you call the “no child left behind” policy, children will continue to be left behind academically as long as income inequality persists, or as long as education standards are tied to household income levels.

The connection between education standards and household income levels remains strong in Singapore despite efforts at providing public education. While Singapore does a relatively good job providing basic public education at heavily subsidised rates – even free for certain families – it cannot deny that going to school alone is often not enough, a situation that is compounded by the varying standards of education at different primary schools.

As a result of meager pay and poor working conditions, teaching standards are far from ideal in many neighbourhood schools and students often find themselves in need of additional help outside of school. Also, the heavy requirements of new syllabi without a corresponding increase in curriculum time forces teachers to either rush through the syllabus or not complete it at all. These are just two of the many reasons why Singapore’s public education system is so sorely inadequate that an increasing number of students have been turning to private tuition which favors the rich who can afford it over the poor who have no choice but to make do with the inadequate public education system. In other words, the poor are being left behind because the public education system fails to adequately provide for them.

While it may be unfair to indict the public education system based on a trend of increasing demand for private tuition, since parents could simply be becoming more competitive and recognise that tuition is the only way to have an edge over other students enjoying public education, the trend itself is certain to cause the gap in education standards between income groups to widen.

The entire tuition dynamic itself exacerbates education inequality by pulling up academic standards for those who can afford tuition and leaving those who cannot afford tuition behind. Assuming that the difficulty of PSLE papers is based on the median academic standard which will now be pulled up, papers will thus become more difficult while students coming from poor families remain unprepared for the greater challenges. With the PSLE being what it is, a crucial deciding factor of the child’s educational future, this can only mean that poor students are consigned to schools which present less hope of moving up the social ladder, not to mention the ramifications such a system of perpetuating poverty can have on the aspirations of poor people.

Even in the absence of private tuition, the quality of education differs very significantly from school to school. There are elite schools like Nanyang Primary which consistently produce top scorers in the PSLE and other “neighbourhood” schools which fare poorly, often precisely because they don’t do well.

Yet parents do not have an equal chance to enrol their child in an elite primary school. The requirement that prospective students live within one kilometer of the school often favors the rich who can afford expensive property at prime locations. Recently, even parents who contribute to the school by giving their time have been favored over those who cannot, a disadvantage for families in which both parents have to work.

Neither is it easy for a non-elite primary school to just spread its wings and fly. Programs like the GEP take away talented students from such schools and send them to top schools with a GEP program. The alumni of established elite schools have the means to donate time and money that the alumni of other schools do not have. With this time and money, elite schools continue to enjoy better facilities and the best teachers. Even if it somehow manages to improve education standards against all odds, poor parents will still face the problem of high property prices. No HDB flat is going to go at the same rate as before when it represents your only chance of getting your kid into that dream school.

What this means for social equality

Under such circumstances, meritocracy becomes nothing more than a myth and there becomes such a thing as “the paper is too tough”. A PSLE paper that is genuinely too difficult for some sections of the student population only points to the fact that some students are being left behind, a problem that as I explained, is usually the result of them coming from a poor family in the first place. Thus social inequality is perpetuated as poor students never get a chance with the education system pitting itself against them.

We can’t all be geniuses…

Ultimately, as social inequality worsens, education inequality can only worsen as well. The SEAB needs to recognize that under such circumstances it would be unreasonable to expect the bottom 10% to keep up with the top 10%, but neither should parents when dealing with their own children. After all, we can’t all be geniuses and until we accept the fact that our education system really isn’t as fair as the government makes it out to be, we’ll forever remain disgruntled with having difficult examinations. Let’s face it, being poor means that your child is disadvantaged to begin with, and while this is no fault of yours, the government isn’t going to let up anytime soon either so there’s no point trying to get the SEAB to lower the difficulty level for your child. It just won’t happen.

… but we still need to beat Hong Kong in TIMSS

Here’s the real reason why examinations are getting more difficult this year. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is one of the few providers of reliable and timely data on the mathematics and science achievement of Primary 4 and Secondary 2 students. Its rankings have always meant a lot to the MOE which regularly flaunts these international studies as proof of our excellent public education system.

Data has been collected for 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007, i.e., every four years. The next study is most likely going to be conducted two years from now, which gives the SEAB just about another year of PSLE to intimidate students with scary questions, and what better way then to never concede that the paper was too tough.

MOE is also probably not too pleased that in 2007 Hong Kong beat us by 8 points, leaving Singapore in second position for Primary 4 Math with 599 points. My guess that it is also gearing up for revenge against Taipei and Korea in the Secondary 2 Math category. Taipei and Korean scored 598 and 597 points respectively against Singapore’s 593 points, leaving Singapore in third position.

This is better than F1.