Regardless Of Grades: Why Are Singaporeans So Obsessed With PSLE?

[Music] today is the most crucial day for a 12-year-old living in Singapore this is the day that you have been waiting for so we will release the results [Music] now Jamie my youngest daughter is also collecting her psle results today I'm finally getting a break from work so I'm going to call my 12-year-old for an update on her results I cannot believe that I'm still this nervous when she's my third one hi sweetie yeah okay now tell me go register numbera okay you hav seen it yet [Music] no Singapore is known to have an extraordinary focus on academic results are you upset with me for pushing you like this yes no yes or no both in recent years sweeping changes have been made to reduce the emphasis on academic results since the psiu scoring system changed in 2021 do you think parents are more or less stressed I find that parents they are more stressed but it doesn't seem to be helping I tell them it's my job to work it's your job to study actually I really feel the pure pressure from surrounding friends oh your son is psle this year what have you done in this episode I want to get to the bottom of what's driving Singapore's obsession with grades I want to get A1 for all subjects let's imagine in the future when you are parents would you want your kids to go through psle and reveal what this fixation is doing to our [Music] children I have invited 20 primary five and six students from schools across Singapore to our studio they are each given 20 cones in four different colors each color represents a source of stress the rules are very simple if you agree with this statement please pick up the blue cone and place it on the Square in front of you it is important to my parents that I get good grades my parents have scolded me because of bad grades my parents have or will reward me when I get good grades my parents have a will sent me for tuition to prepare for the psle my parents have compared my grades with my friend's grades out of the 100 blue cones there are 70 blue cones on the ground this represents the number of times the kids agreed on the statements relating to parental pressure Xavier so you agree with all five statements yeah if I don't do that well right then they'll be kind of disappointed because they really putting a lot of money into the tution it's like kind of common for them to like compare cuz I realize a lot of other parents also like to compare their their children's grade with other people's grade when your parents started comparing your grades with other people's grades how did that make you feel it made me feel disappointed in myself as I did not do as well as my friends you are in P5 now how much tuition do you have I have tuition almost every weekday how do you find the tuition I find tuition long and boring as it just takes up my time and sometimes it doesn't even help me CLA so you agreed with two statements so I'm curious good grades are not important to your parents and yet they send you for tuition and compare results with your friends why is that so they don't really mind if I get a failing grade but at the same time they want me to do better than average at least what's the best subject you've ever scored so far science science what did you get yeah one wow it's really hard to score for science did your parents not praise you when you got there I don't think they really put a lot of focus on it because I think they were more focused on my other subjects cuz I didn't do so well next the red cones these represent self-imposed stress having good grades means that I'm smart means that I will have a brighter future anyone can get good grades if you work hard enough I feel disappointed in myself when I get a bad grade I consider myself a failure if I don't get the results I aim for for the psle 42 out of 100 red cones have been picked up by the children looking at the numbers parents seem to be the biggest source of stress for these kids compared to self-imposed stress both of you agreed with the statement that you are failure if you don't get the PSO results that you aim for why it's because the grads that I made may get uh um not really up to my standard not to my parents standard it's uh bad grades actually Josh what about you my mother and my father put a lot of money but end of the day when I fail they were like be very disappointed do you think that you give herself a lot of stress sometimes yes because I want to get to a good uh Secondary School of my choice so it can help me further on life who told you that uh my parents [Music] so it seems the stress these kids place on themselves still inadvertently comes from the parents yellow cones represent stress coming from teachers my teacher announces the top scorers for tests and exams Praises specific students for getting good grades pushes me to get good grades expresses disappointment stresses on the import of the [Music] psle my Chinese teacher was like reading out from like highest to lowest and then I was like one of the last 10 people then she'll read your name and your score you're like kind of set like it's like the class you spit into force and like that corner towards like the bottom left is like all the people who score quite low you also agree that the teacher stresses you they don't even know that you're stressing out by saying oh you're doing really well because they have really high expectations of you once you get a certain grade so adults have to treat very carefully what we see [Music] yes and finally the green cones which represent pure pressure I tend to compare my grades with my friend's grades my friends often compare their grades with mine I need to outdo my friends in exams I feel upset when my friends score better than me my friends encourage me to get good results when I look at the display of colored cones blue stands out the largest source of stress on these kids parents the fewest number of cones are the red ones so comparatively there is less self-imposed stress as a parent of three the result of this social experiment does not surprise me still I wanted to dig deeper into what really lies behind our obsession with our children's grades so I commissioned a nationwide survey covering parents of primary five and six kids this is the first survey since the recent education reforms in Singapore [Music] and on my result slip were shown the highest and lowest scorers for my cohort Jason Tan is a former school teacher who has been commenting on the local education system for nearly 20 years he took the PSL a decade before I did hello Diana Jason have you got it oh yes I have oh my gosh it says pass to P6 there are no results none at all well di you can notice a few interesting features here for one thing there's no indications of any of the individual subject grades or scores and I have no indication about how well I performed relative to the rest of my exam cohort were you stressed about the psle not at all nobody compared results with other students just because you couldn't uh that's true that was back in the 1970s let's go backwards tell us why the psslu was introduced in the 1960s that was a time when the people's Action Party government had just come into power and one of their Promises to the population was to provide equality of treatment for all of the four language streams English Chinese Malay and Tamil and establishing a common exam in the form of the psle meant providing a greater degree of equality of opportunity for access to secondary schools was there the kind of stress that we seem to see today probably not I think that the pressure intensified after the introduction of streaming at the end of 1980 when your psle results determined which of the three streams back then special Express or normal you had access to when I took my psle and you get ABCDs for your results and then the results were refined even further with the introduction of the a star why was the estar introduced it was introduced in direct response to complaints from some parents that their children who had scored A's were unable to gain access to their preferred streams all secondary schools so the Ministry of Education introduced an extra grade AAR in order to Signal greater differentiation among top performers in the psle it's it is ironic that sometimes the more transparency there is the more stressed parents and students become let's move on to the 2000s this is my producer certificate dated 2004 by then the double weightage on languages had been removed why did they do that that was introduced in a bid to promote bilingualism among students that policy was subsequently removed in 1985 on the grounds that it meant a less accurate sorting of students into the various streams in secondary 1 if you were a parent with ambitions for your child to enter say a prestigious secondary school or a prestigious stream you would then think to yourself now that the double weightages for those two subjects have been removed my child has to perform well in all of the four subjects and that might have in fact increased the pressure on students to make sure that they scored equally well across all of their four psle subjects so I have a certificate here from last year psle um how different is the a scoring system how does it work the previous PSID scoring system involved an aggregate range of over 200 and if you look at the current scoring system you will see that the total scores range from 4 to 32 which is a vast reduction and that I suppose is what the Ministry of Education calls a reduction in fine differentiation uh which is supposed to reduce this constant competitive stress it's the school holidays but it's also barely 4 months to the PSL hey h the planning for the June school holidays I want you to plan for this week Monday you have to go back to school for conditioning K Tuesday you have Learning Journey Wednesday also conditioning Friday you have B from 9 to 1200 and night I want you to plan Chinese Aura practice with me every single day every single day before you [Music] sleep there's no school work then it's tution work but if it's no tuition work then it's the assessment books so I'm actually very packed I actually feel like I don't really want to do this but um but my psle is nearing and this schedu is pack mini because of my mom [Music] I have tution textbook reading practice papers and note takings I will do different topics on different days I will do this every single day my dad is trying to make me get full marks because I'm making some careless mistake here and there so my dad just send me to the boot [Music] camp the boot camp happens five times this one week from Monday to Friday and one day is 5 hours okay so whenever we do this type of question we have to put it in a very nice format right boot camps are typically held during the school holidays with many of them focused on helping primary five and six students prepare for the psle now do take note now in psle if you encounter any visualization questions that you don't know how to do are skip first fees can go go up to $500 Singapore dollars for a 5day camp but still they are over subscribed nor OD years are more difficult uh we are expecting more challenging types of visualization questions to be shown it's clear parents are stressed about the psle but do they know exactly how is affecting their child I am revealing the results of the earlier social experiment to [Music] parents how important are academic grads to [Laughter] you if I say not important right then a lot of people won't be very happy with me right it's so important for me because I want to have a better future it will help me to have a better job so that I can spend money on my mother and my dad I don't like the thoughts of psle and all of those other examinations everybody wants success I want the best for my children if everybody's doing it if I'm not doing it I think I'm setting him up for failure earlier I conducted a social experiment to find out what is the biggest contributor of stress to our kids it revealed parents to be the biggest [Music] stressor I've broughten Amy and Dean whose children were part of the experiment if I don't do that well right then they'll be kind of disappointed because they really putting a lot of money into the tution they they don't really mind if I get a failing grade but at the same time they want me to do better than average at least am Xavier said that he's worried that you would be disappointed if he didn't get good results how did that make you feel as a student is their responsibility to you know to study well to get good good grades but he's afraid to disappoint you every parents I mean do have some expectation from grades definitely it will determine the schools they get it has he ever said that to you directly um sometimes when he get the result you know not so good then he say um yeah Mommy I'm sorry I will try harder do you feel guilty when he says that I do do you know if your child will be disappointed depending on your reaction I think it's it's very clear that the child picks up on what parents view I tell them it's my job to work it's your job to study we also tell them that they actually not competing anyone but themselves it's funny you said that because uh to the question my parents have comp compared my grades with friends grades both the children said yes then how did CLA get that impression I guess it's more a question of maybe asking her you know how well did she think she she did in that result and then maybe getting some information uh from various sources on how well the others have been doing to kind of then give her her own sense of Benchmark in terms of how how well she did I mean now the education system being so non focusing on results there's no class ranking so maybe perhaps it's this lack of information that is then creating a need by parents to get more information the kids have spoken and that seems that the main source of the stress coming from parents are there other sources of stress and then you transfer the stress to your child actually I really feel the pure pressure from surrounding friends oh your son is psle this year what have you done so one of them would share with me this um tuition Center is not bad so from there since there is information so I kind of prep my son then my son will ask me why am I going for tution then oh no no it's okay just try only try so see if you like sounds so familiar yeah I mean that is a real fact Asian parents you know we we put us stock into how our children do for education so I think that that kind of um mentality is in the mind is in suggest whether you like it or not Saturdays he has math tution from 9 to 11 then he has English tution from 2:15 to 4:15 on Sundays he has science tution from 11: to 1 and Chinese tution from 3:30 to 5:30 and then Thursday he has a Chinese [Music] tution I started my Tam tution at P3 I started my math science and English tu at P5 I feel like we should have sent him earlier because the P5 to P6 is like a big jump so that's why we feel like tutions are [Music] necessary she currently only have one tution and only for Ms my husband is a soul bread Winer so it's quite training financially for us uh to send them to additional classes actually if we have a choice we'll put her through lessons definitely [Music] after school hours places like these come to life that's because tuition is a billion dooll industry in Singapore and these days regular tuition just isn't enough there are also academic enrichments centers offering unconventional teaching methods 10 seconds keep your in your back ready what the first picture J from intense memory practices claiming to stimulate your right [Music] brain to speed [Music] calculations to exercises that supposedly help you excel at maths and if this looks like Child's Play It's not this 10-minute activity claims to help spatial processing and visual verbal fluency which would in turn help with maths and reading sounds incredulous our Nationwide survey of parents with primary five and six children found that 28% of them have enrolled their child in such programs to prepare for the psle even more parents 60% sent their children for [Music] tuition among them 65% send their kids to three to four classes 6% to five or more classes and is not just enrichment classes and tuition 68% % say they use assessment books or practice papers uh here I have the stacks of worksheets about 15 School St past papers means uh they probably might have came out in past exams and it might come out again in the exams in the future okay so these are all the science papers so the next p is the English P it's a lot so the next p is math so these are all the papers I've done a lot yeah it's harder but no other choice we do spend a lot of money on this he has to get a good marks okay these are the assessments and everything here right and over here this is phrases for creative writing Prim three and four this is for my math for premy 4 this is my english comprehension skills workbook for uh P3 and P4 is because psle is actually a cumulative of all the work which is why all this books itself even though it's P3 and P4 but it's still useful I think I'm more nervous than he is for psle but will all of this out of school study rarely translate to results during the national exams to find out I'm getting exclusive access to the team that sets the psle exam papers I have grouped the questions into easy average and challenging for the purpose of our today's [Music] review my perspective of tuition comes from my own experience when I went to Secondary School my results started getting worse and then that's when I had my my first tution but I didn't get any better you know even wor yeah it just hanging down there why because I was just not concentrating or or fail it's just past you know back then in the past I do not believe in tuition at all until I became a mother and then I felt like if I have the means to give my child tuition I should give him whatever he needs you've never gone to tuition and you forced me to do it it's a different era okay the overall standard of this examination is comparable to previous years B off for the first time ever on national TV we are watching the process of how a psle paper is set today's review is for the 2023 Mets paper starting with the grou of easy question question five TS students knowledge and understanding of anger properties why are it 18 24 and 63 included as options and not 22 I think we need to make this part clearer question 12 is intended to be a challenging question yes we need to include such items so does figure Tre need to appear right at the top together with figure one and two so can we explore maybe perhaps making changes to this diagram I'll confirm this questions then the panel has a rigorous debate on all the questions that are being set now now I know there are easy average and challenging questions uh for me the key thing is what is the percentage of allocation for all these three categories of [Music] questions this man was involved in setting the psle papers for eight years tell me what is the percentage of each category of questions within one paper we have 15% of the question in psle that is deemed as challenging and this will be the more higher order thinking skill that's being tested why 15% so if we have 15% of the questions uh for the challenging Parts students will be able to assess know largely the 85% of the marks so already showing that they have uh the competencies to deal with many different types of questions so what I'm hearing is that if you can tackle the easy questions and you can tackle all of the average questions minimally you should be able to get 85 marks without even tackling the challenging questions at all I mean the data has shown as high as close to 50% of students score 7i so in a sense it's very accessible to the students so in tackling such challenging questions is it possible for me to drill my child drill drill drill do different permutations do different types of questions go for tuition can I then tackle at least most of the challenging questions I think drilling doesn't help uh what really is important is for students to understand and master the skill set if the students continue to do a lot practice paper without fully understand and appreciate and identify patterns it will not help because once the context of the shape change they will not be able to uh do the questions you know I've been trying to find parents who don't enroll their children into tuition classes and not because they can't afford it it took me months to find this parent Gwen go has never enrolled any of her three primary schoolo children [Music] intuition and she isn't intending to even for her eldest daughter Ashley un who is in primary six this year from P1 all the way to now they actually ended P5 zero tuition zero just say I just your past then okay I feel lucky it's like some other parents will just push their children to get like higher Mark CU I'm not very good at my studies especially science so I'm just glad at least a past can do it she gets stressed out whenever um she receives back her results so I would just ask her you ask herself do you put in your best effort she said that I did and I trust her so I just say work harder next time do you you think that you might in a way be disadvantaging your kids as a result of that maybe yeah but I feel that the school teachers uh teaching is sufficient so it's a way to train them to focus in class telling them that you got no extra help you have to focus in class it's less than three weeks before the big exam this time Caleb is attending boot camp as well today you're going to do like more than eight different [Music] experiments this is an extra class for me sometimes I do feel kind of tired and I'm like asking my mom why did she send me for this kind of classes but I know that it's for my own good I already C A DSA for Victoria but then is just that I also want to get good marks even though aant is guaranteed a spot in the school of his choice it seems to have done nothing to relieve the pressure to [Music] score like now the preparations have intensified I'm trying to touch on all subjects like at least two papers each day finish okay he will finish the papers in the morning then once come back either me or my husband that we'll take one paper and then start correcting and then he has to listen through the feedback who is by Stander after work we just need to work even more harder in order to help kaleab with his science I tried to memorize the science notes that was given to him the [Music] accident I have been taking half day leave and nearer to psle I may need to take a full day leave CNA survey found that 56% of parents have or are considering taking paid leave to prepare for the psle 27% have or are considering changing their job role 34% are considering or have taken no pay leave that's not the only sacrifice parents are [Music] making these parents are taking things one step further on top of sending their children for tuition they are attending tuition CNA survey showed that 19% of parents have attended tuition workshops or seminars to better prepare them for their child's psle there will always be a later part in the energy question where something changes I stand science tutor Jay's on started these monthly psle prep workshops in 2017 now this is what I call a level one question so it's quite basic please never ever skip all the statements what was your biggest takeaway from today's session Karen for me it's more to uh understand the topics that was covered at least when I go through his papers or his homework maybe I will have a better understanding whether he's doing it right I think the biggest takeway is actually common pit Falls and answering techniques to all these questions you you sound like you are the one stting for the exam uh I can't go for the battle for him but I can prepare with him for the battle I I just want to make sure that everything is on is on track it makes me feel more confident maybe why do you do this are grades so important to you is that it uh grades are important to me yeah I'm not ashamed this say that I I always give them the the choice to choose what they want in life but there are basis of Life Choices that I have to be part off and grades and education is a very important thing to me you can be the best YouTuber out there but I need you to have your grades first now if you recall under the new psle scoring system instead of T scores students will receive their scores in achievement levels this means instead of having over two 100 possible Aggregates there are now only 29 possible scores ranging from 4 to [Music] 32 since the psiu scoring system changed in 2021 do you think parents are more or less stressed I find that parents they are a little bit more stressed and maybe I'll show you the grading system so that you can have a better idea first is the AR 1 to4 where the mark range is actually only five marks difference between them so for parent whose children are scoring within this range they are a little bit more stressed because any careless mistake or even mistakes that they make they can go up or down this grade very easily for science especially we are looking at um two marks for every McQ question even with the two marks question that they lost it could cause them a a great drop in the old scoring system even if you lose one or two points it is going to impact your overall grade no in the olden system they still had the top band which is the 91 marks and above which is they called the a star previously now they call it the ar1 from 90 but the second band for the Oden system they actually have it the a rate which is from 75 marks to 90 marks which now is actually split into three groups smaller groups of the al2 3 and four so in the past the students can drop one two to four months but they're still within the second range they still a for example yeah but now they are in the part where it's really string between that three Al levels okay so because al2 and al3 is a onepoint difference and it's going to impact on the cutof point for your Secondary School admission yes correct so basically in this week I am doing study study study study study and more study and zero games is more [Music] at night are you upset with me for pushing you like this no yes no yes or no honesty both cuz I still feel that I should have some play time I'm like angry that like Moe created psle can it just be like the normal exams like P1 P2 P3 P4 those kind of small exams usually I have like difficulty sleeping at night and then like uh when I'm studying also my mind would grief off into thinking like what questions will come up in psle I'll use this for writing and I also have a pencil which is the same color so I use this for shading the OAS this it's my favorite color it will just make me lucky for all the PSL papers I'm going to use all of these so that I'm extra lucky I won't eat any egg during the exam or before the exam so that I won't get te ta means back gr I think ta means zero so K's birthday is actually during the the psle period oh I cannot eat cake you can't eat cake has eggs there have been many attempts over the years to reduce the over emphasis on grades starting in 2012 when the tradition of naming top psle scorers was dropped but I can't help getting the feeling that we are still stuck with no results to show hi if the adults can't seem to crack this can the [Music] children [Music] when I think of P the animal will be is lion it's a lion a lion because it's very like a very big exam because if I fail my P my mother would eat me up but if I pass she will feed me no that's not true pressure he has upon himself he doesn't want to fail cuz it'll kill me [Music] probably after months of preparation it's finally D day today I'll focus on English and uh tomorrow after I have done my English psle I'll focus on math as that is the next [Music] paper it's green r so far I feel like it's going well I don't know about what is my marks but I felt like I did well last already final push already okay mhm B is finally coming to an end the the six years that I've been practicing for PS is finally going to pay off after the psle over four in 10 Primary School teachers are mobilized to Mark about 300,000 answer scripts which is why schools are closed during this period marking takes 3 [Music] days [Music] my daughter is getting her results today I'm tied up at work so I can't be at school with her okay tell me I'm ready okay are you happy yeah well done sweetie congratulations it's over no more psle I don't wish psle upon anyone specifically [Laughter] parents okay hello hello so how you feel sh happy oh my go oh my gosh my robot please all right just thing you ask for is the robust amazing Kay my results what I expected was way different now the heart all paid off I I can cannot be more proud than that I mean she deserves it very proud of him relief so then usted so now we celebrate she say she'll make me do practice on the next eight subject he will need to start earlier already so but not on all the subjects because we are not exactly sure of the curriculum but he's starting his science tution in January next year so for secondary school so we didn't want to have any filming that day because we were like stressed out so I was like really tensed okay so I was sitting at the Puja room and then just praying when he went to collect the res it was like oh L up L up yeah uh he did well um so overall it's uh I I think for me it's above expectations I felt fairly happy um H especially I felt very happy for math Caleb IRA and adant didn't get perfect scores one even got a double digit but yet they and their parents are satisfied probably also relieved at the fact that this huge exam is over adant got into his top secondary school choice via the direct School admission while Caleb entered the secondary school that is Affiliated to his primary school Ira succeeded in getting into her second choice of [Music] school I arranged to meet the three of them a month after they started secondary school I want to know if their perspectives towards grades have changed after they conquered the biggest exam of their lives is it worth all the effort that you put in for psle um I think it's worth it because um it has helped me improve my fundamentals if we didn't have the preparations before psle we be struggling a lot in secondary school because there's like much more work that we need to do in secondary school so maybe we should suggest toe to do the PS all over again what please no let's imagine in the future when you are parents would you want your kids to go through psle yes it's yes yeah it's a learning point for everybody um but then I really want the psle to be postponed like like like 14 to 16 years old I agree with him cuz like uh when when it's popor like our child will be more mature then the parents wouldn't be so stressed also since you all don't want to remove the psle how can we make it less stressful Caleb it's it will start with the parents like less nagging and like probably like more encouraging would do the trade so can I humbly ask you as a parent tell me the difference between nagging and encouraging I feel is mostly the tone and the facial expression the tone and the facial expression sometimes my mom like why don't I like kill okay okay okay how should I do it if your like kids they they didn't like me your expectations don't like say like oh you never stud don't like make it sound like you're disappointed with them so what advice would you give to parents whose children will be taking psle you shouldn't buy so much assessment books CU like my parents bought like way too much assessment books for me in like for preparations each assessment books has 100 plus pages so like how do I complete now that you're in secondary school do grades still matter yes I think grades still matter your future is dependent on your grades you can't just slack off then you know all all levels are you know coming up your P Serv score determines which secondary school you go in which secondary school you go in will affect your grades in o l and everything and that will affect which way you go like JC's that will affect like like your your degrees and everything okay so nag less encourage more something new I learned today but I've also realized that a lot of what I've learned in this documentary isn't all that unfamiliar to us parents and kids still think that grades are important so perhaps it shouldn't be about saying that grads aren't important but rather that greates aren't everything but Shifting The Narrative will take time that still is a lot of work or should I say homework that needs to be [Music] done [Music]

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 234,281

Keywords: /tv

Id: d5X8pJu2R0s

Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024