I refer to the article Merit-based excellence .

While I share the writer’s sentiments in calling for a better scholarship selection process, I have to take issue with some of his proposals.

Firstly, he argues that candidates should take the SAT and pay for it themselves to qualify for scholarships. Isn't it obvious how discriminatory this is? The purpose of most scholarships is to help not just the brightest but also the needy among them -- how would they afford to pay for the SAT themselves?

No candidate should ever have to pay to qualify for a scholarship simply because it hurts the people who most need scholarships - bright but poor students.

Secondly and more fundamentally however, I would like to address the assumption that the SAT should be used to award scholarships on the grounds that it is the most objective.

The SAT is not objective. The critical reading and writing sections depend on the subjectivity of the candidate and the marker. This is especially true of the writing section, where there are many ways of answering an essay question, not just in terms of points made but also style.

Furthermore, the SAT is culturally subjective. It is in American English, underpinned by American standards, and marked by Americans. While America does have some of the world's top universities, so do other countries like the UK, Australia, China, France, Germany, and so on -- why not adopt their admission criteria to award scholarships?

There is no guarantee that American universities or education will remain pre-eminent forever either, or even that their standards now are necessarily the best. Having the best universities in the world is not logically equivalent to having the best admission criteria in the world.

Ironically, for example, the maths section of the SAT - the only truly objective section - is by far easier than STPM maths, or Singapore's A-level maths. Perhaps we should use those exams instead of the SAT to judge quality!

In light of all this subjectivity, it is particularly misleading for the writer to use physical situations as analogies to the SAT or other standardised tests. Yes, almost everyone can see tangible things like whether you can reverse-park or not (badly, in my case), but intangibles are so much harder to judge. In fact, even in physical situations you will get plenty of disagreement, like deciding whether or not a footballer has committed a foul.

These arguments against the objectivity of the SAT are also applicable to any other standardised test - even IQ tests. Ultimately, the decision to use a particular standardised test as a basis for awarding a scholarship is only justifiable if you can point to some sort of correlation between the purpose of the test and the purpose of the scholarship.

It would be ridiculous, for example, for a dance scholarship to use the SAT as its primary requirement, because the SAT is supposed to be a measure of how qualified a candidate is to enter an American university, not a school for dance.

Similarly, is the purpose of the JPA scholarship simply to give the best and brightest an American education? Not at all. It is to turn them into skilled citizens who can serve the country well and while this may or may not include an American education and thus the SAT, it definitely does not rest solely on the SAT, since SAT is not intended to measure qualities that determine how well a person can serve the Malaysian public.

All the above are subjective areas, because subjectivity in education is unavoidable; all we can do is work towards making our subjective standards more consistent, rigorous and transparent.