@seunoyebode mentioned about how children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. I thought I can share a bit of how it looks like from a local born and bred Singaporean… I like how our education ministry is making moves towards less exams-focused system. It’s applaudable. But I thought the headline was kind of misleading…

Parents and children continue to be ‘willing victims’

Most parents and students in Singapore have an exams-oriented mentality and will likely continue to, because other than the first 2 years of school without exams, all the other remaining 10+ years will have it. So there’s no escaping yet. We even read of how some parents even go to the extreme of approaching tuition centres to get their children to get mock exams there…why? Because of perceived competition. 

Teachers know it should be less about exams, but they are not incentivized to do so

How things are taught in school are very much focused on finishing the required curriculum. Most teachers are over-worked, and systems of performance and rewards tend to center around whether they can finishing teaching the required material, and how well their students do at the exams. After the students graduate, whether they get good jobs at the end of their long education runway, no teacher’s really tracking or getting incentivized for it. There’s a principal-agent problem here. 

Most employers still use educational papers as filters

Employers continue to “require degrees” in their ads, so society’s benchmarks of what constitutes a good job and good pay continue to be pegged to a degree. If you don’t have the required educational papers, you won’t even get past the first filtering stage. It’s an easy way to narrow down potential candidates, but a dangerously outdated one. You hear of progressive companies like Google and Apple not looking at degrees anymore in their hiring, but that’s just the front-edge of the curve. Not sure we will ever get to that utopian scenario where all employers look at your skills and portfolio of work rather than education. 

Education is a massive oil tanker - it takes miles to do a u-turn

The truth is, there’s many moving parts to this huge ecosystem of institutions and actors, and such changes will take a long time (if ever). Overall, there’s lots of sunk costs emotionally and financially into a successful education system that had worked maybe too well, because now we are victims of our success. Any change - not just on the school side but also parents, children - will be difficult. To be honest, I’m not so optimistic about it adapting to change at a fast rate for my child and the immediate next generation to benefit from. What next? Maybe modern home-schooling might be a possible fringe solution, but that’s a whole other topic for discussion…