Singapore – The Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is usually a daunting task that often leads to tears among 12-year-old candidates. This year, it has also left parents upset and annoyed.
On Friday (Oct 1), there were two maths papers, resulting in some parents receiving disappointed calls from their kids who didn’t expect the questions to be extra difficult.
“I cried too. Especially since I knew that she had prepared so much for the exam,” said a parent in a Straits Times report.
She added that the new PSLE Achievement Levels (AL) scoring system had increased the pressure on students taking the exams.
“Whatever achievement level they get is what they get, there is no longer a bell curve, and the exam felt harder than the 2020 paper,” said another parent.
Another factor that parents and children struggled with was the adjustment to home-based learning amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“All my friends were left speechless after hearing how hard the paper was from their children and that many were unable to complete their papers. We knew that the PSLE mathematics paper would be hard, but they should have set the difficulty at the same level as last year’s paper,” said a parent to ST.
The new scoring system is no longer based on a student’s performance relative to their cohort in a T score.
Students are now given grade bands between AL1 and AL8 based on absolute scores. AL1 is the highest score, with each AL grade for each subject being added to reach the final PSLE score.
A particular question involving coins, allegedly from this year’s exam, has been making rounds on social media after the maths paper finished.
The question reads, “Helen and Ivan had the same number of coins. Helen had a number of 50-cent coins and 64 20-cent coins. These coins had a mass of 1.134 kg. Ivan had a number of 50-cent coins and 104 20-cent coins.”
Candidates were asked who had more coins and by how much. They were also asked for the mass of Ivan’s coins in kilograms based on the weight of each 50-cent coin being 2.7 grams heavier than a 20-cent coin.
It is unclear if the question was shared precisely how it appeared in the exam or paraphrased by the adult who posted it online.
While many were left scratching their heads, netizens quickly got solving.
Here are a few answers:
Others noted that the question, which is timed and worth four marks, required logic.
Meanwhile, some took a different approach to the problem:
This year’s PSLE started on Thursday and will end on Tuesday (Oct 5)./TISG
Read related: Parents weigh in on how the PSLE system pushes kids
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