Singapore abolishes school exam rankings (2018)

This is brilliant! Learning should not be a competitive.<p>EDIT: Why would you want to have children compete with each other on learning abilities? How does it help anyone? If a child is going to take a tad bit longer to understand than another child, I would rather the child take a bit longer to master than force the child to acquire the knowledge within a set duration. If they score 90% of the marks would you be happy that they scored 90% or unhappy that they could not master the remaining 10% and will never be given a second chance to do so? And what if your child crosses the passing marks of say 40%? Would you be happy that your child scraped through with passing marks or be unhappy that it never got that extra time to learn the remaining 60%? Not every child has the same grasping power. And by making learning a competition you are taking away the right to learn from a majority of these young children.<p>I would rather the child compete with others on what it has learnt on a practical basis rather than theoretical! Currently, scores only determine how much of the theory the child has been able to master. There is no process that examines how that theoretical knowledge has been used effectively throughout the lifespan of the learner which is actually more important.<p>Let them learn at the pace they are comfortable with. By making sure more children are properly educated we will, as a society, automatically reap the benefits of their future contributions. With competition, you are restricting the scope to the &quot;gifted few&quot; who will then have to bear the burden of the rest.

Makes total sense. If the kids are able to solve the problems at hand, why would there be a need to separate them? Just make sure you test whether people have learned what they&#x27;re supposed to.<p>Along the same lines, why punish someone for being in a class with another competent kid?<p>As for worries about places in further education, it&#x27;s easy to make things hard enough that your lecture halls aren&#x27;t stuffed. Doesn&#x27;t require you to rank everyone.<p>I think I&#x27;d have learned a lot more if everything had been pass&#x2F;fail. Not just because it&#x27;s easy to get to the pass line, but also that I&#x27;d challenge myself more with more advanced stuff.

Without rankings how do you determine how to allocate scarce university spots.<p>I think there’s much more potential for bias when every position is just based on some committee’s prerogative in a way that is very difficult, if not impossible to measure.

I helped to set up a syllabus for a part time coding bootcamp. One of the things we did was to eliminate any grading, although students who completed the project would get to graduate with honors.<p>The idea was that when I was in college, I found a lot of students avoiding the electives where they would learn a lot, in favor of electives where it was easier to get good grades.<p>The good part was that we could push them extremely hard. There&#x27;s a point where most of them feel like it&#x27;s not the right career choice and we can push them past that plateau. Since a lot of them are doing it at night and weekends, they don&#x27;t always have a lot of willpower or commitment. The drop out rate is a little lower than expected.<p>The bad part is that they don&#x27;t push themselves hard enough. A lot of the difficulty is in things that they can just grind through - loops, arrays, functions, conditionals. But they don&#x27;t work hard enough at it, and don&#x27;t become &#x27;literate&#x27; enough to solve some basic problems.<p>The other downside is that a diploma sells certification, and not necessarily education. Something that&#x27;s easy to pass is &#x27;not recognized&#x27;, even if the students learn more in the end.

I&#x27;m rather skeptical of this news and perhaps just some typical PR effort by singapore government.<p>Remember Singapore has a notorious education system of sending children in different tracks at an age as early as 8. That is, in your 3rd year in primary school, you&#x27;ll sit an exam that would probably determine your life trajectory.<p>If you do well, you&#x27;ll be enrolled in better programs, better school and would go to college. If you don&#x27;t, you&#x27;ll be wrapped up and sent to classes with little resources and guidance and often times incompetent teachers, and what&#x27;s more, you would not be qualified to sit an college entrance exam, which means, the best you can achieve is Polytechnic schools. In singapore&#x27;s caste system, a Polytechnic student is at the very bottom.<p>The intention and justification of this system is that people are born with different levels of intelligence. To allow all people to have a college education is not merely a waste of resources, but also not useful and meaningful for those who are just average.<p>How do people cope with this system, well, rich people can either hire tutors or have mother work as full time educator(often in case when the mother is highly educated). Their children would win out in that race at age of 8 and would continue to win and would go to the same several elite high schools, which ends in a situation where the transportation minister has never taken public transportation ever in his&#x2F;her life.

&gt; says learning is not competition<p>The children are still graded. Grading, or at least its interpretation, depends on the students performance. How is this not a competition?

So did Zimbabwe for the very same reasons 2 years ago

Competition is a good motivator. At the same time the feeling of continuously &quot;losing&quot; is not, so rankings should be used carefully as part of a wider pedagogical approach.

something I don&#x27;t understand of this approach, how can one strive to get better if there is no better to get?