It was the night before the math CCT. Swimming through the seas of undated notes, sprinting fingers through MSN Messenger to answer my doubtful mind, munching Milo powder in a desperate attempt to hold up my heavy eyelids. Ah, the sleepy odor of déjà vu. It was the night before the physics CCT. Swimming through…… Ah, you get the point.
If this is what happens before every CCT, what is the point of having CCTs? But first, what is the point of CCTs? Or rather, what is the school’s aim of having CCTs? From the word ‘test’, we can infer that the school is trying to test whether we have absorbed what we have learnt in class. Unfortunately, for all of us, in our CCT filled lives, we don’t remember everything we’ve learnt everyday in class, and what’s more unfortunate, is that a majority of us don’t have to pay attention in class, study last minute, and still achieve commendable results. This can be seen from, well, almost everyone. Why is it that the night before the CCT, instead of your MSN Messenger contact list being empty and dead, everyone from class is online, with the status ‘busy’? Obviously, everyone is asking each other about things like what would be tested, or what have they learnt, or what notes are useful, etcetera. Is this what the schools really want? Sleeping in class, rushing information into your head at the last minute, still getting 4.0, is this what our Singapore’s world renown educational system is made up of?
Not only have schools missed out on the students’ point of view, they have came up with a solution, but it is not widely use. The solution? Performance tasks. Learning how to work in a group, researching on information by yourself from libraries or the internet, learning how to make full use of Microsoft Office, speaking in front of your class, designing posters, writing reports on your project, aren’t these skills more essential than trying to memorize information by heart, and spilling it all out the next day on a piece of paper? In the near future, when all of us will be most probably working, will the skills acquired from the doing performance tasks more practical or memorizing skills acquired from last minute memorizing of information? Okay, some of you might say that “Hey, I don’t memorize stuff last minute, I listen very attentively in class, and only need to flip through my notes for a few minutes.” Fine. Granted that not everyone is like me, let’s make a comparison: Firstly, we can acquire new knowledge, from atomic bonds to algebra, from both CCTs, and performance tasks. However, the practical skills acquired from doing performance tasks can never be touched by studying for CCTs!
Based on the knowledge that the students of today won’t improve as much doing ALL CCTs, as compared to ALL performance tasks, I strongly propose that we scrap the CCTs, and instead, replace them all with performance taks.
