Malaysian Education System

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Its sad but this is the truth, for example recently, there was an article on Students need to meet the required grades in order to do medicine. How to meet the required grades if they just focus for exam purposes? Critical thinking skills are not instilled in the students, students are spoon fed with answers. If a student learns through exploration and experiments in short if hands on activities are involved where students learn through many methodology, high chances are there that they will meet all the demands for a bright future.

We should also look into the student centered approach rather than concerntrating on teacher centered approach . Teachers are just facilitators, students should be allowed to do their own findings, in short they should be taught to be independent and not being too depended on their teachers. Another famous trend is most of the time before the public examination, for an example SPM, students can be seen so hardworking studying based on something called “Tips for examination” students who tend to trust and work on the tips they receive, most of the time do not do well at the end, this is because, since they are too engrossed studying based on the tips they receive, they do not concerntrate on areas which may be equally important and what happens at the end is too disappointing. They not only do not do well in their examination, but they also will be less motivated and this will affect their entire other subjects and results.

Exams are important to gauge a students understanding however what is more important here is the method used to test the students knowledge. They should be tested in all areas. Students should also be tested on their critical thinking skill ability. In an exam oriented syllabus, we are ignoring students with special needs, we fail to realize that students who are not bringht academically are of some additional talent, which we as educators should be able to see and enhance their speciality, as such exams can be held in various way taking into account the needs of all students. We must understand that every child are unique in their own way. As Howard Gardner has stated that every child has different kind of multiple intelligence in ones self, Students learn in ways that are identifiably distinctive. The broad spectrum of students - and perhaps the society as a whole - would be better served if disciplines could be presented in a numbers of ways and learning could be assessed through a variety of means.

This clearly shows us that Exam oriented syllabus should be relooked in order to cater the need of every child as the notion of our country goes

“No one should be left behind in education”. Examination is not everything, there are many important areas that are yet to be explored.