Celebrities in Singapore displaying their PSLE T-scores. Image was taken from https://www.8days.sg/sceneandheard/celebrities/would-you-share-your-psle-score-on-social-media-these-celebs-did-10724954

Singaporeans carry a label unique to them for life: their Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) T-scores. Singapore has one of the most competitive education systems in the world. Students are scored, ranked, and sorted from an early age and at various points of their educational journey. Due to the high stakes nature of the PSLE, there have been calls for it to be scrapped because it has long-term pacts that are both psychological and academic.

The government has been adamant about retaining the PSLE with the former Minister of Education claiming that it is a “useful checkpoint” (as cited in Teng, 2018). However, they have announced that the T-scores will be replaced by a new scoring system from 2021 onwards, which aims to “reduce fine differentiation” at a young age (MOE, n.d).

Fraser (2005) suggests social justice as a “parity of participation” (p.73), as both an outcome where “all the relevant social actors… participate as peers in social life” and as a process in which procedural standards are followed “in fair and open processes of deliberation” (p.87).

Fraser also argues that social injustice appears in three ways:

1. economic maldistribution
2. cultural misrecognition
3. political misframing

Hence, I decided to write this post because primary school education is viewed as Singapore is regarded as:

• affordable – because it is state run; therefore accessible to and participated by every student and essentially free for the underprivileged;
• fair (i.e. just) – because it is based on a meritocratic system;
• open – because scores are known to all;
• culturally relevant – because it is part of the national culture as it is taken by every student at the age of 12; and because of the fixed subject combination (English, Mathematics, Science and Mother Tongue).

My argument is that according to the social justice framework, changes to (and from) the new system are affirmative and not transformative in nature. Hence, the new scoring system will not be effective in addressing both of the above-mentioned aims.

PSLE Scoring Systems:

Economic maldistribution 

The new scoring system does not address the economic maldistribution among students at all. While, all students go through the same education system, not all of them receive the same help. Students from more privileged backgrounds have the luxury of receiving private tution, an industry that has recently been evaluated to be staggering $1.4b (Cheng, 2019). This change is affirmative because reshaping the competition does not remove the (unfair) competition conditions.

Another policy change further exacerbates the problem of inequality. Examinations will be removed for Primary 1 and both Primary 1 and 2 student will not be graded. The rationale behind this change is that it will ease the pressure on students entering primary school (Davie, 2018). Unfortunately, I believe that parents who in to compete will continue to do so. One possible scenario is that lesser-privileged students will only exposed to exams in Primary 3 but the ones who are better-off will get a two year advantage in terms of exam preparation because they can afford private tution.

Cultural misrecognition 

Singaporean students are required by the Bilingual Education policy to learn their subject matter in English and a Mother Tongue. The subject matter in English rarely takes into account the cultures of minorities. The Chinese majority (76.2% of Singapore’s population) is fairly diverse, with sizeable Christian or irreligious proportions. Hence, culturally western educational materials suit them more than the ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic minority Malay community, which is almost entirely Muslim.

Furthermore, English is the emerging language of the young among the Chinese population, with 48% of all children aged 5-14 years speaking English as their dominant home language (Singapore Statistics, 2010). In contrast, only 9.4% of Malays in the same group claim that English is their dominant home language.

Political Misframing

In this respect, the change in scoring system is neither affirmative nor transformative. Hodkingson-Williams and Trotter (2018) argue that to counter “asymmetries of political power” (Fraser, 2009, p.103) it is necessary to include the stakeholders who are not part of the authorised contexts in deciding “what counts as valuable knowledge, appropriate skills, and desirable dispositions” (p. 208). This policy was conceived by the government with little input from stakeholders such as parents and students. This top-down decision can only mean these stakeholders have to adapt and cope with the changes that they had no say in.

More importantly, I argue that the new scoring system increase fine differentiation, pressure and stress. To equalise a group, there should be a reduction in stratification. To reduce stress, there needs to be a reduction in pressure. Basically, a course where everyone passes simply by attending should have much pressure on the students, and therefore not be  very stressful. For a course that requires assessment, ideally there should only be a pass/fail distinction. In such a scenario, a student who scores 75/100 cannot be pressed to score higher than that in the future, or be compared to a student who scores 90/100.

Yes, there will be less stratification with the new scoring system compared to the old T-scores. But, how about at subject level? Previously a “B” student can only be pressured to work towards an A. Now, we have greater stratification, which would likely lead to greater competition as there are more grade bands to differentiate students.

Conclusion

In summary, the new scoring system is merely an affirmative change that does not address the economic maldistribution, cultural misrecognition and political framing problems that plague our education system. Moreover, they may have no, at best little or even adverse effects in terms of reducing fine differentiation.
Most importantly, this blog post highlights how an affirmative change can be ineffective because, unlike a transformative change, it does not tackle the root of a system’s problem(s).

References:

Cheng, K. S. K. (2019). Tuition has ballooned to be $1.4b industry in Singapore. Should we be concerned? Today Online. https://www.todayonline.com/commentary/tuition-has-ballooned-s14b-industry-singapore-should-we-be-concerned

Davie, S. (2018). Schools to cut mid-year exams for several levels; Primary 1 and 2 pupils will not be graded. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/schools-to-cut-mid-year-exams-for-some-levels-primary-1-and-2-pupils-will-not-be-graded-or

Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. New Left Review, 36, 69-88. Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii36/articles/nancy-fraser-reframing-justice-in-a-globalizing-world

Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A., & Trotter, H. (2018). A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 204-224

Ministry of Education (MOE), (n.d.). New PSLE scoring system. https://www.moe.gov.sg/microsites/psle-fsbb/psle/main.html

SEAB (n.d). Frequently asked questions. https://www.ifaq.gov.sg/seab/apps/fcd_faqmain.aspx?qst=hRhkP9BzcBImsx2TBbssMsxu7lqt6UJK70a1wAEVmyfdSZlp3kC3qEU1uwdD2zxBC8h26bwjs%2FIwvamUXpJQllIbGr3zfx%2Fg6R5G3kQwdaBqrmc6VVtGVreSd34s3fzQd2XjpEaXHjFH9k4Aky4ad22Tv9ZVP3e82AhV2YIeMwaGIBKFIrvh5zfUcyEdjkBGvw8b%2Bh1woqMmu1%2FCwl6UK4xSGccfs%2FuC2rGMLPsW7lE%3D#FAQ_93277

Teng, A. (2018). Parliament: PSLE doesn’t cast in stone what students can achieve in life, but removing it is not the way to go, says Ng Chee Meng. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/politics/parliament-psle-doesnt-cast-in-stone-what-students-can-achieve-in-life-removing-it-not-the

Week 8: Critique of Singapore Meritocratic Education System using Social Justice Framework / Illyas Lim Effandi / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0