I am one of the 450,000 students who took the inaugural PT3 exam in 2014. Dec 22, the day when the results were announced, when I took the slip, my hopes of scoring good results were dashed, my heart sank and I tried to hold back my tears in front of my family. I was so angry that I started a mild argument when my parents questioned my effort in studying, telling them I’d tried my best.

That day, many students were heartbroken when they were handed the slips, some of their dreams of entering boarding or cluster schools were crushed. Many parents were frustrated and dissatisfied of their children’s result, which were not entirely their fault.

Bad planning and the ineffectiveness of PT3 proved to be a major setback in Malaysian education. The Education Ministry must know that we were not ready for such a change in a short period of time. Also, not to mention that the last-minute changes of the system caused confusion not only among us but the teachers as well. As a result, we innocent students paid the price dearly over a matter that wasn’t in our control.

The pass rate of PT3 plunged down drastically and only 83 of the 450,000 students managed to score straight As, to put that into context, only five thousand of us. There are many reasons why this is happening and it needs to be stopped to ensure the development in Malaysia.

First of all, the abolishment of PMR. Why take away something that works fine, and replace it with a broken one? The abolishment caused formal exams to be replaced with school-based assessments, also known as PBS. (There are many problems with PBS too, but that is not the topic for today.)

While some good schools continued to have four informal exams a year to keep up their performance, others only had as little as once a year, just for class management. This causes many of us to be lazy or less hardworking than before as we only have exam once a year, even some teachers cut some slack while teaching.

Secondly, the sudden introduction of the new PT3’s format is the main reason of why many of us did badly. Unlike previous exams, the questions are all subjective-based rather than objective-based, which requires lots of thinking and writing rather than choosing answers. Some of the questions were High Order Thinking Skill (HOTS) that were neither taught nor appeared in textbooks before.

We had insufficient time to learn about the new format. We only knew the format in June, four months before PT3. We and the teachers barely had time to understand it. We were trained and taught since primary school about the PMR examination format and were used to it, the sudden change gave us lots of stress.

All of the tactics, tips and tricks we were taught for answering PMR years ago must be scrapped to pave the way for PT3. Even the teachers were confused about the new marking scheme; they were used to marking based on the answers given to them.

Now, some of the questions are opinion based, which could have more than one answer. Teachers were forced to think if the question can be accepted or not, teachers might have different opinions, so an answer can be not accepted even it is reasonable. This caused problems between teachers and students because some think that the answer is right, while some didn’t.

Last-minute changes

Thirdly, last-minute changes to PT3 caused problems among students and teachers. At first, it was said that PT3 has only four subjects, which are Bahasa Malaysia, English, Science and Mathematics. After that, changes were made, there will be school assessments for History and Geography, following up with Speaking and Listening tests and lastly the addition of Living Skills (KH).

All of these must be done and keyed online before the deadline, which was before October. Teachers have little to no time to teach us about PT3 because there is a lot of work to be done, we were forced to learn some by themselves. All of these must be done within the four month’s time while preparing for PT3.

Last but not least, the grading system is ‘standard setting’ rather than ‘standard fixing’, which means grades will not be lowered like previous years to get A, but following the standard ‘80 marks is A’, and yes 79 is counted as B.

I was heartbroken by this especially, because most of my subjects are extremely close to 80. Some of my friends failed to achieve straight As because of a subject that is near 80. All of us including teachers thought grades will be lowered because it is the first year, and told us not to worry if your score is higher than 75 as you are guaranteed an A. We were wrong, even the teachers were not informed about this.

I am very sad along with all of the Form 3 students this year, we would want PMR to be reintroduced, but it is too late now. We were the unfortunate lab rats in a failed experiment, and our effort and time put into studying were all in vain. There is nothing that the Education Ministry can do to compensate for our losses.