Don’t let exam results decide your fate

My friend and I were discussing about our kids’ coming UPSR examination ... he has a son who is the same age as my daughter, so both our kids will be taking the primary assessment exam in a couple of months. My friend asked me ... “Eh, how many ‘A’s do you think your daughter will get ... can get straight ‘A’s?

WHAT? Straight ‘A’s? Look, knowing my daughter’s academic abilities, it is almost like striking a lottery ... next to impossible. Really, I am not looking forward to ‘A’s in my daughter’s UPSR result.

But then, how important are the ‘A’s?

Every time when exam results are released, we only hear praises for the straight ‘A’ students or those who obtained many ‘A’s in their results. Most people are fast to applaud and offer a pat in the back only to those who made it good in their exams. What about the vast majority who did not get any ‘A’s and those who didn’t even make it through? Are they not worth a few words of encouragement?

Hey, we are all different ... so, we learn differently, we have different inclinations and we learn at different rate.

Among us, there are kinesthetic learners, visual learners and auditory learners ... then we have people who are math inclined or language inclined and those who are inclined towards art. And then some learn very fast, some slower while others may need longer time to learn.

So, should the thousands of different individuals who all have different learning skills and abilities be tested and measured by the one same mean (exam)?

What I am saying is ... education is not just about getting the ‘A’s. I don’t know about others but for me, if you don’t get the ‘A’s in school, it doesn’t mean that you are any less “educated”. I don’t think exam results should tell you what you are worth.

Don’t let exam results decide your fate ... you may not have the ‘A’s to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer but you can be the likes of Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg ... an entrepreneur, a passionate dream chaser and a world changer.