Assessment modes like projects, interviews tend to handicap working-class children
By Chua Mui Hoong, The Straits Times, 30 Sep 2012
At 18 going on 19, back in those days before the Internet when 18 meant you were still gawky and green and wet behind the ears, I faced an interview panel of adults who fired various questions at me.
I can't recall the specifics of what they asked. But I felt I was doing all right until one of them asked: "Do you read The Straits Times every day?"
I replied: "No."
The atmosphere in the room shifted. At 18, I couldn't have told you what Singapore's level of exports was, or discussed the impact of the Chernobyl disaster that year. But a lifetime of reading books and body language sensitised me to changes in moods and emotions.
I felt I had blown the interview with that one candid answer.
I didn't get the scholarship I was applying for to fund my undergraduate studies. It was a competitive award and there were more impressive candidates.
But I think my answer did not work in my favour either. Particularly since the folks interviewing me were from Singapore Press Holdings, and the newspaper I had confessed to not reading every day was its flagship daily. (Ironically, even though I didn't get that SPH scholarship, I went on to make a career in SPH as a journalist, where I still love my job after 21 years.)
Later, reviewing that moment in my mind, I wondered why no one had bothered to ask the follow-up question: "Why?"
I also kicked myself for not having had the presence of mind to explain why I didn't read The Straits Times every day: "My father reads only Chinese and subscribes to the Lianhe Zaobao. I buy The Sunday Times with my own pocket money - and I read it cover to cover."
It didn't occur to me that not reading the paper daily could be taken as a sign of intellectual dullness, lack of interest in current affairs, or disdain for the outside world.
I don't know if it occurred to the adult interviewees that an 18-year-old might not read the paper daily simply because she couldn't afford to buy it every day. It probably wouldn't have made a difference anyway.
I remember that incident when I hear calls from parents, teachers and others for Singapore to broaden assessment modes in schools. Scrap the Primary School Leaving Examination. Don't let children do the O levels. Don't admit students to university just on grades.
Instead, introduce broad-based assessment modes like project work, interviews, oral presentations, group work. Build leadership skills, social skills, confidence and self-esteem.
I understand the sentiment behind those calls. I also agree that the PSLE in its current form is not ideal. Too much is at stake in a single high-stakes exam. What if pupils fall ill that week? Tweaks to split it over two years, as some have suggested, can be considered.
My main concern is whether other modes of assessment - like interviews or project work - handicap students from working-class backgrounds.
Maybe it's just that I used to do well in paper examinations. But I think Singapore should think very hard before it does away with too many tests and exams in its school system.
As many have pointed out, scrapping the PSLE will just create other hurdles for pupils to cross. Without the PSLE, how do you assess if a child has attained a certain level of academic achievement? How do you allocate places at secondary school? How is an employer to know if a worker who left school at 14 is literate and numerate?
Exams have received too bad a press. An exam or test, properly understood, is not just a testing tool. Used well, it is also a good learning tool.
An exam is also a great social leveller. You study and revise, and you go into a room with all your classmates. In the exam hall, it's just your mental acuity, the exam paper, and your pen. No one cares how untidy you look, how you dress, how you speak.
Your parents' connections might have helped you gain access to that company chief executive or that former politician to interview for your project on social history. Your parents' money might have helped pay for exotic materials to be flown in from overseas to aid your experiments.
But those connections and resources can't help you in the exam hall where you sit alone.
In my view, qualitative assessments like project work or interviews can supplement tests and exams. But they are also areas where social and cultural capital give children of more educated and wealthier parents an advantage. They can become means to entrench the privilege that children from better-off homes already enjoy in school.
Cognitive and psychological biases in interviews are well known. People tend to like and recruit folks like themselves. Who can blame an interviewer with a love for classical music for being impressed by a 12-year-old who can speak with conviction about a performance at the Carnegie Hall, and rate him higher than one who doesn't know Justin Bieber from Johann Bach?
In contrast, children from homes where English is not spoken, start off with a handicap. Even today, my written English may be idiomatic but my speech betrays my late entry to the ranks of English speakers as I learnt English only in school at age seven.
In the 1980s, I got into Cambridge University on the basis of one literary practical criticism admission paper administered by the college I was applying for. If the admission process then had required an interview, I would never have got in - first because I couldn't have afforded the air ticket there, and second because I would certainly not have impressed well-spoken dons in the land of dreaming spires with my diffidence and my Singlish diction.
Of course the demands of the marketplace today require students to go beyond rote learning and written expression, to work together in teams, to express themselves verbally and engage others. Our education system's curricula and assessment modes must reflect the changing environment.
But we must also understand that students from poorer or less-educated homes take time to pick up the social and cultural habits that will help them succeed in life.
Expecting them to overcome their handicaps at 12, or 14, or 16, and be as confident, well-spoken and well-versed in all those social and cultural memes upper middle-class children take for granted, is just not realistic.
If you scrapped the PSLE and replaced it with a series of smaller tests, and placed great emphasis on oral presentations and "show and tell", who will do better? The child of dialect-speaking parents who work two shifts to make a sparsely furnished home for their children, or the well-travelled child of professionals in a home with interesting artefacts amassed from across the world, who can tell stories of influential people who dropped by at home?
The greatest disservice we can do to working-class children today is to tweak the examination system in such a way that their hard work in mastering the syllabus to sit an exam is undervalued, and they are instead assessed in areas where they have a native handicap, long before they can hope to overcome it.
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