The details of the failure rate among students who sat the Samoa School Leaving Certificate Mathematics exam last year are truly frightening.
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Not one of nearly 1,400 students who sat the paper received Grade 1.
In fact, the best student achieved Grade 2 followed by five students who gained Grade 3, 12 who got grade 4 and 21 who achieved Grade 5.
This was revealed by the Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture (M.E.S.C), Matafeo Falana’ipupu Aiafi, yesterday.
He was speaking to parents, students and teachers during a meeting held at the E.F.K.S Hall at Sogi.
Organised by M.E.S.C, the meeting was an opportunity for the Ministry to respond and clarify any issues regarding the exam in question.
According to Matafeo, if the scaling system were used to mark the exam, from the 22 students who achieved between grades 2 and 5, after scaling, it would show that 789 students had passed.
“That’s a big difference (in the pass rate),” he said. “And that’s the reason why the Ministry has decided to use raw marks to mark the test so that the truth will come out and we would focus on the areas that the children need help with.”
Matafeo conceded that the issue is not new and it had been masked over the years by the continuous using of the scaling system, instead of raw marks.
“The truth needs to come out,” he said, so that the Ministry can begin working with the schools to do what’s needed to avoid such failure.”
Professor of Mathematics at the National University of Samoa, Dr. Karoline Afamasaga Fuata’i, also spoke during the meeting. She said the claims that the exam was not based on the Year 13 Curriculum are not true.
“I can assure you that the S.S.L.C Math Exam 2014 was based on the Yr. 13 curriculum and all the questions were based on the learning outcome inside the prescription,” she said.
“The University and the Ministry have worked together to ensure that the exam was fair. Everything in the test was based on the Yr. 13 curriculum.”
Dr. Fuata’i blamed the teachers for using past exam papers to teach students instead of the curriculum.
“That would be a problem because the teacher should teach the students according to the curriculum,” she said.
“In every year’s exam paper, there are different questions however the core topics and core learning remains.”
The Professor said the teachers should also help students look at Mathematic problems in different ways.
“There are two major concepts of Mathematics; they are conceptual structure and conceptual knowledge skills.
“Conceptual Knowledge Skills is the ability to think creatively about, analyse and understand complicated and abstract ideas.”
“The students should be creative in looking at any Math problem and that will help them during the exam as well.”
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