Rising Standards of Examination Questions

[gifted_indian]

Hi all,


I have been in touch with the school syllabus for quite some time. And I am shocked by the increasing standards of examination questions, more evidently in the upper primary levels.

Then, there are the textbooks versus the past year examination papers. The differences in standards are truly far apart - one emphasises on the basic concepts, the other on heuristics, process skills, and everything else you would expect "Singapore’s Brainiest Kid" to solve and get all correct.

My question: To keep up with the standards of probable questions, would you look at the year of publication, or exam paper year? Is there a flexible "rule of thumb" to denote whether the questions of that particular cohort could be rendered "too easy, can throw", or "2006 - 2008 can use, anything before that would be too easy" kinda thing?

[mrswongtuition]

If you are talking about maths, the syllabus has changed to allow use of calculators for certain papers. Without the need to manually calculate your answers, questions will of cos be harder and require more thinking

[sleepy]

It’s not uncommon to hear of P1 kids doing P2 or even P3 assessment books. They are all geared up way before commencing P1. With children getting smarter & smarter every year, can’t set an exam paper where half the class get full marks, right?


For Maths, the shift in focus is towards brain maths. I suppose the abilty to think critically is important for our future generation to compete internationally, more so than ever, thus the shift towards thinking maths to stimulate the minds.

[atutor2001]

gifted_indian:

Hi all,


Is there a flexible \"rule of thumb\" to denote whether the questions of that particular cohort could be rendered \"too easy, can throw\", or \"2006 - 2008 can use, anything before that would be too easy\" kinda thing?

For math. a \"5-mark\" question in the early 2000 will not appear as \"3-mark\" question. So I don't throw math paper away.

There is not much change in English and Science.

[gifted_indian]

atutor2001:

gifted_indian:

Hi all,


Is there a flexible \"rule of thumb\" to denote whether the questions of that particular cohort could be rendered \"too easy, can throw\", or \"2006 - 2008 can use, anything before that would be too easy\" kinda thing?

For math. a \"5-mark\" question in the early 2000 will not appear as \"3-mark\" question. So I don't throw math paper away.

There is not much change in English and Science.

That's the problem you see. I realise a rising standard in English too, especially P5 and P6. I gauged that by assessing the vocabulary words for Q16-25. Even the SynTrans questions on Q66-70 seem to have more diverse sentence structures for transformation. Gulp. o.O