Reading the above, I feel that MOE is moving a step forward in making every school of an equal standard. I applaud for their effort. It can be seen that MOE wants to remove the public’s wrong impression that schools which produce top scorers are the good schools in Singapore. In fact, I can see that many more neighbourhood schools are producing students with better national exam results.
However MOE still have a particular area for improvement – the way of dealing with students’ national exam results. I will list down my view and suggestion below.
Currently, students are still admitted to higher education based on their national exam results. The students who score a better grade will proceed on to study in more well-known schools. The rest of the students are left behind to study in neighbourhood schools. For instance, Raffles Junior College takes in majority of 3 pointers ‘O’ Level Students, rejecting the rest of the students with a poorer grade. How is this considered as making every school of an equal standard? In this case, MOE is still indirectly drawing a line of separation between the extremely smart ones and the normal students.
I feel that all national exam results should not be released to the students or public. These results should be taken note by MOE officials and school teachers confidentially. When a weaker student enter a school, that particular school should have already taken note and provide them with extra tuition and attention after curriculum hours. This will ensure that the weaker students will not lose his/her self- confidence after seeing their poor results.
Hence, I suggest MOE to remove the process of admitting students to higher education based on national exam results. MOE should allow all students to choose any school of their own choice or convenience.
At the same time, both groups of students (extremely smart ones and normal students) are able to interact with one another, and learn the good points from each other. In this way, it will enable Singapore to have a generation of equally capable Singaporeans. Singapore’s education system would be a success!