I am pleasantly surprised that in the thirty hours or so since i posted the first three parts, news seems to have spread again, with comments hither and thither. anyway i’ve finally figured out how i want to phrase the last half of my rant, which is now rapidly losing emotional steam and degenerating into an opinion/editorial-like pseudoessay. and no, i am not still in that biochemistry class right now. so here are the next few installments. (whether or not there are any more depends on how much residual rant still lives on.) this part expounds on the various uses (and abuses) of examinations, and what they are trying to measure.

- part iv -

organizations have long given their own examinations as a means for differentiating the large numbers of candidates for open spots, and to aid their selection of successful candidates. this began with the chinese civil service examination system way back when, and was an institution that survived the dynastic cycle intact and kicking. i remember reading in some history textbook that some historians even claim that even in times of inter-dynastic anarchy, people still faithfully registered and took the entrance examinations! astounding!

of course, our dear mm claimed that he decided that gee, since this worked so well for imperial china, it must therefore work well for singapore as well and therefore instituted mass examinations and (by induction) created the entire scholarship system as well, to have the best and brightest steer the future of the country. (on a side note, this claim is not quite complete since reliable historical evidence exists that the british colonial system also did place emphasis on examinations, and did administer examinations, such as the qualifier for the venerable rhodes scholarship. and what do you think the ‘c’ in gce ‘o’/'a’ levels means? it certainly doesn’t refer to some synonymous city in massachusetts, usa.)

it is arguable that in the years before and immediately after singapore’s independence, such a system was need for lubricating the engine of modernization that supposedly propelled singapore from its third world, ok-so-i’m-independent-now-what state to the ultra-modern economic miracle it is today. whether it has indeed attained its targets is of course an entirely different story, since quantifiable metrics, i.e. economic indicators, paint a picture that jars with the anecdotal experiences of the lay singaporean. and consider this: merely a generation ago, the concept of mass literacy of one that was just sinking in to the populace. our grandparents’ generation was one huge collection of hardworking illiterates, punctuated by the occasional person who stayed in school long enough to pick up an alphabet, a handwriting style and perhaps some knowledge of the world. i bet if you administered any gce examination to them, the vast majority of our grandparents would have ended up being labeled as blithering idiots. maybe someone should travel back in time and sell them ten-year-series first.

let’s make it painfully obvious why the preceding situation is ludicrous. any examination system, by definition, differentiates good candidates from bad candidates, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ being defined as the score obtained on some examination script taken by the candidate, as graded by some rubric. the examination therefore picks out a select group of ‘good’ students, which are a subset of the entire candidate body and are therefore a set with restricted diversity in characteristics. this discrimination is based solely on some imperfect measure of the candidates’ knowledge of some specific canon of facts and/or skills deemed to be important. that is why it makes no sense to administer a written test to illiterates. many other examples abound in the educational psychology literature, particularly with regard to cultural settings. an example in point: a tribesman from the depths of the borneo jungle would fail a popular culture test miserably, and we would fail to survive in the borneo jungle just as miserably. what is considered ‘important’ is a highly culture-specific thing.

so the chinese civil service examination made sense in its time. simply by requiring that candidates be able to read and write, a vast majority of the unwashed populace was thus excluded from a system where record-keeping is of paramount importance. academic examinations, of course, work well in their academic settings: assessments for coursework play an integral part in modern education; the french and chinese universities still give their own proprietary entrance examinations to this day to select promising undergraduates to groom. but since the advent of the industrialized age, the need for mass education to promote mass literacy had precipitated the need of standardized testing, in the form of gce/gcse certificates and sat/act/gre scores. a recent development in the field of educational testing, standardized testing is seen by relieved bureaucrats as a convenient measure for deciding who to admit to college and who to condemn to working as roadsweepers for life. (the occasional drop-out-turned-billionaire is to be forgetton as merely “one of those flukes”).

examining agencies, however, readily admit the limitations of standardized examinations. the educational testing service, administrator of the infamous scholastic aptitude test (sat), used to have this disclaimer on its website that its examinations should never be used as the sole judge of a students’ worth, and stressed the importance of the considering entire application package. (i have been unable to find this disclaimer again when i checked just now, so this could be just a figment of my imagination.) independent research studies by many educational psychologists have concluded that the sat scores are a reasonably good predictor for scholastic success in college, but is useless for predicting anything else outside its
intended scope, such as future salaries.

a telling foreshadowing for the abuse of examinations now turn our attention back to our little red dot (or in modern political parlace, our little piece of snot). the idea of using standardized examinations has been carried to an overly rational, and hence illogical, extreme: instead of using such examinations for what it was intended for (for which it is by no means perfect), it has become a determinant for one’s social status and hence place an explicit (albeit well camouflaged) cap on the net value of one’s worth. while maternal pride at studious progeny is undoubtedly a chinese tradition dating back to mencius (or before?), presumably a predication of future riches and/or social status and a rich source of proud maternal stories and dreams of eternally bright futures, studiousness no longer has any intrinsic meaning in determining one’s future success (or lack thereof) in society.

this misguided assumption is reflected in our education system: we have the slow ‘normal stream’ track, the intermediate ‘express stream’ track, and the various highfalutin’ ’special’ tracks like the gifted education program (recently scrapped in favor of integration into the curricula of top schools), special assistance program schools (a relic of the bribe made to the chinese intelligentsia to shut up while lky anglicized singapore), and now the special schools. no i don’t mean special education for the mentally retarded, bless their souls. i meant the nus science school and the singapore sports school. and tellingly, few people remember the mentally slow, a significant fraction of our population rapidly being left behind by the accelerating pace of change in our modern globalized society. but back to the other special tracks, the impression that the civil service gives us is that if you’re not one of their scholars, you’ll forever be second-class to them, and forever suffer less experienced (and possibly less competent) scholars promoted over your heads while you continue to slog away toward that glass ceiling? (ok, enough scholar rants here. i suppose i’ve made my point already.)

a particularly interesting aspect of our education system pertains to scholars-to-be: the gce a’ level papers 0, the so-called ’s’ papers. presumably meaning ’special’ papers, but more accurately termed ’scholarship’ papers, the anecdotal history of papers 0 indicate its creation by the ucles to as to fulfill the need of a scholarship agency to refine its pick of candidates, who have been picked up more and more perfect-looking grades from institutions that used to be schools, but had degenerated at some point in its history into diploma mills. now ’s’ papers were meant for the exceptionally bright to strut their worth by pitting their intellects against problems of higher difficulty as compared to the typical ‘a’ level question. now we have the usual trappings and paraphernalia that surround every other subject: lectures on ’s’ paper topics, ten-year-series for ’s’ papers, and horror-of-horrors, model answers for ’s’ paper questions!

drawing from local scholarship history, this scholarship agency must be none other than the public service commission, at one time the only such agency based in singapore, and still the issuer of the most prestigious scholarships today. but consider this, my dear civil servants: what the hell does a background in electrical engineering have to do with the civil service? if you claim that such backgrounds promote the development of skills such as critical thinking, why not just test that outright? why insist that scholars maintain their “standards of excellence” by consistently scoring high grades, groom them to become useful engineers/scientists (and precious few humanists), then grab them back home and mire them in administrative trivia for the rest of their lives? is this not the clearest example yet of a complete mismatch between what academic scores say and what these people will eventually end up doing? are the best students necessarily the best leaders? and are lousy students necessarily lousy leaders?

ok, i have to stop now, or i’ll never be done picking on scholarship agencies. it is a sad reflection of the times when even the best and brightest among us have to stoop to rote memorization to keep ahead in an ever-changing rat race, and have to jump through higher and higher hoops just to succeed. and sadder still, when those in charge insist that academic merit is a critical feature of a promising leader of tomorrow’s society.

- end of part iv -