From 2019, all weighted assessments and examinations for Primary One (P1) and Two (P2) students will be removed, the Ministery of Education said in a press statement on Friday, September 28.
This includes removing the year-end examination at P2.
Teachers will continue to leverage assessments to check for students’ understanding, and provide timely feedback to improve learning. However, assessments that are conducted will not be counted to form any overall mark or grade.
In addition, mid-year examinations for Primary Three (P3), Primary Five (P5), Secondary One (S1) and Secondary Three (S3) students will also be removed over the next three years (2019 to 2021).
MOE explained that these are transition years, during which students will be exposed to new subjects and/or higher content rigour and expectations. "We want to provide them with adequate time and space to adjust to the increased curriculum demands."
This removal of mid-year examinations will free up to about three weeks of curriculum time the students. Schools will use this time to develop 21st Century competencies in students.
Moreover, the Holistic Development Profile (HDP), commonly known as the ‘report book’, will also be adjusted at all levels to better support a student’s learning progress.
From 2019, the HDP will no longer present certain academic indicators such as class and level positions of the students. This is to enable each student to focus on his/her learning progress, and discourage excessive peer comparisons.
Qualitative descriptors will be used report students’ learning at levels that do not have examinations. For the other levels, where marks are used to report students’ learning, these will be rounded off and presented as whole numbers, without decimal points.
With these changes, the reporting of each student’s progress in various domains will be better balanced, reducing excessive focus on marks, MOE said.