PSLE Maths Too Hard?

Apparently, there’s this short section on sample PSLE Maths questions in today’s newspapers, or at least my mom only showed me today. Recently, there’s quite an “uproar” regarding the difficulty of the Maths paper this year. Of course, I didn’t read that from the newspapers la, knowing me. xD Seems like this year’s complaints are quite “fierce”, so I thought it’s gonna be an “eye-opener” seeing some of the sample questions. Perhaps I’ve expected too much from these samples (though probably not 100% identical to the actual paper), which I presume belong to the “harder” category that many parents have found.

Much to my disappointment, the questions are not hard at all. Yeah of course, asking me to do such questions now may be way overkill, but given my competency level at primary 6, I wouldn’t have found the questions difficult at all. I’ll try to reproduce the questions from the papers (I threw away the piece of paper. hohum) and tell me if you agree with what I’ve said. Don’t worry, the numerical values (including the marks awarded) are going to be accurate (I have no freaking idea why I can remember those values). It’s quite hard to believe that some teacher claimed that the average student will not be able to do these questions, and he (or she) took 20 minutes with the help of a calculator to complete. Seriously, such teachers should just retire (my mom told me it’s some teacher with 40 years experience, means old liao).

First up, the easiest question of the 3 “showcased” in the papers. And it goes something like this. Shop A has 156kg of rice (maybe it’s not rice, but doesn’t matter), while Shop B has 72kg of rice. Each shop sold an equal amount of rice and after that the ratio of the amount of rice left in their shop was 4:1. Find out how much rice has been sold. (3 marks) In what way is this difficult? It’s not something that primary school kids wouldn’t have seen before. It’s the same kind of concepts used for “John is <insert number> years old. Joe is <insert some other number> years old. After <insert some number> years, their ages are <insert ratio>”. I mean, it’s perfectly do-able without algebra. Models (which I learnt during P sch and didn’t really like to use anyway) are still taught in primary school I believe, and this technique is definitely useful in solving this question. Anyway the answer’s 44kg. Just take 72 – [(156-72)/3] and you get the answer. 1 step. Ok lah, the average primary school kid should take 2-3 steps. But yea, this question is definitely no issue.

Question 2 goes something like this. 6/14 of the chairs in the hall are in rows of 13. Half of the chairs in the hall are in rows of 7. There are 112 more chairs in rows of 7. The rest of the chairs are stacked up. Find out the total number of chairs in the hall (5 marks). Just basing on the approach of the question alone, this is definitely another “freefrag”. The harder part imo, is trying to understand all the English used in the phrasing, which was one of the irritating things I hated about Maths in p sch back then. So actually, the answer is something like 112 * 14. The answer, if you do it straightforwardly without checking your answer, is 1568 (incidentally 1568 = 2^10 + 2^9 + 2^5), but is it really the right answer? All right, as pointed out by some brilliant friend of mine, the answer we get technically does not fulfill the first statement, since 6/14 of 1568 is not divisible by 13. Even after finding a total number that fulfills the first 2 statements, the 3rd statement fails. Lol. Oh well, the important thing that they wanna illustrate (or rather try to convey) is that the questions asked are testing things that are supposedly not taught during normal curriculum, but miserably failed. I believe the actual question can’t be so ambiguous. Anyway concept wise it’s not difficult what. Still don’t understand the hoo-ha.

Pardon my lousy drawing using MSpaint, I should really have scanned the paper before throwing it, or at least take it using my HP (my HP cam like doesn’t really serve any proper purpose now. hic). Anyway, here’s the last question featured in the papers. So the question goes: water is filled to the brim on the left hand figure, and then is poured into the figure on the right until they have the same water level. What is the water level? (4 marks) Not very hard, just take (50 * 40 * 60)/(50*40 + 70*40), and the answer is 25cm. So yeah, I still don’t see why it’s worth complaining about.

The difficulty of these questions are something I’ve seen during my p sch years so I suppose it’s not so bad what. After all, after I left p sch there seems to have more emphasis on “thinking skills” in primary school, or at least that’s the kind of impression I get from news reports etc. I guess it’s not really working, or certain parents are just complaining too much. Surprisingly, none of the sample questions contained those number patterns/sequences or those IQ-test-like questions. I would think those type of questions will be more challenging for the average student.

Apparently, there’s also some comments by teachers and one of them seem to be really disappointing. Lol, maybe he or she should get out of the teaching vocation soon, for the better good of students under him/her. Oh no, that sounded a little offensive, but yea well.

Oh well, maybe it’s just to create the annual buzz on the PSLE, or maybe some parents just never learn how to complain with some kind of concrete backing, or maybe some parents just can’t accept that the school did not prepare enough questions of this level (or higher) to their children. Shrugs. Whatever the reason, I don’t find it convincing to have such an uproar. Don’t you think so too?

p.s. Sorry if I sounded emo in certain parts of the entry. Emo is the “in” thing these days. XD