Your Excellency, the High Commissioner of Australia,
Dr Peter Knapp, Director of EAA,
Honoured guests, principals, teachers, parents and students.
Thank you for inviting me to this event.
Let me say a few words on what I see as the relationship between educational testing and assessment and Malaysia’s educational aims and ambitions.
Malaysia is committed to creating a world-class educational system. We are also committed to bridging the divide between the haves and have-nots, and perhaps more significantly, between the “knows” and “know-nots”.
We are committed to excellence, and we are also committed to equity; and very importantly, to equity in education.
I do not pretend that there is no tension between these two aims. In a world scarce resource, so the saying goes, resources we spend on developing our most advanced students (in whole distinguished company we are today!) might also have been spent on helping the least advanced. Resources we put in a struggling rural school might have been put to a good urban school to make it even better, and so on. Balancing such competing requirements, making hard decisions and tradeoffs, is a big part of my job in the Ministry of Education. Some of these choices give me sleepless nights, but there is no avoiding them. I believe, however, that if we focus only n the tension between excellence and equity we are taking the short-term view. I believe that for Malaysia, in the long run, these two aims are not only compatible with each other but also necessary for each other.
This is because what we seek is not just to have excellent individuals but also to be an excellent society. An excellent society is one in which nobody is left behind. An excellent society is also one in which each person; each community has the resources and the freedom, to be their best, on their own terms. In such as society the excellence of particular individuals and particular institutions is directed towards the common good and measure by its contribution to the common good.
Educational testing and assessment play a key role in this project. They help us to benchmark our schools, students and staff. They help us diagnose problem areas and identify the right solutions. They keep us accountable by objective standards. They help us progress towards our goals. They enable us to make comparisons between schools, school district and between countries. If Malaysians are to compete in an international economy of talents and skills, we need to know how we stack up compared to others. If we want to go forward, we need to know where we are. If we want to improve, we need to know how we are doing.
Testing and assessment helps us to achieve our educational goals, but they are not replacement for those goals. I hear the complaint of many parents that our education system may be overly exam-oriented: there are too many tests, or we make test an end rather than a means. In such an environment, some might wonder whether we might need another test, another competition. I sympathize with such complaints. My Ministry is looking into ways to make the educational experience of our children less exam-oriented. The answer, however, is not abandon testing and assessment but to have more enlightened testing and assessment.
Better testing begins with seeing it in a broader perspective, and using it for truly educational purposes. As the International Competitions for Schools shows us, you can do many things with tests. In the past we have tended to use tests only as selection process for advancement to higher education. In this process, the gateway to increased income and opportunity for some can become a barrier to entry for others. We cannot get away from having to sort and select students, but let us make no mistake: this is mainly bureaucratic rather than an educational function. If we use testing only in this narrow perspective we will end up losing sight of our educational aims. We will end up with an exam-oriented educational culture in which students learn things only because they are in going to be in the exam. We will end up educating to test rather than testing to educate.
I commend the International Competitions for Schools for testing skills, critical thinking, and creativity, reasoning and problem-solving. All too often we test information acquisition rather than skills. In the Information Society, however, it is not information, but the capacity to process information, but the capacity to process information that is scarce. In the Information Society information is cheap. The higher order skills; creativity, reasoning and critical thinking, are expensive.
I am told that each student who participates in the Competitions receives a diagnostic report on his or her performance. This focus on skills and on diagnosis keeps testing and evaluation process forward-looking. Each participating school also receives a statistical report which helps the school to benchmark itself against other schools domestically and internationally. It also helps the school to identify underachieving students. Again, to keep this process is forward-looking this data is not available to government departments or to other schools. Like constructive criticism, educational testing for the sake of diagnosis and benchmarking is designed to help the recipient improve. (I wish more of the criticism that comes our way in a huge ministry I oversee were of the same nature).
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I believe we can use sophisticated, skills based testing and evaluation tools such as the EAA uses in the International Competitions for Schools to help us achieve our goal of building a world-class educational system that leaves no child behind. On the road to a more excellent and equitable educational environment we must continually refine the tools we use to diagnose our strengths and weaknesses and measure our progress. As we broaden our educational horizons we must also broaden our perspective on testing and assessment.
I think the EAA and UNSW for making your assessment tools available to 28,000 of our students. I congratulate the medallists, their teachers and their parents. You make Malaysia proud. Your achievements set a standard for everyone else and encourage your fellow students to do likewise.