Of Sweets and Chocolate

Before you start wondering, nope, I did not go on a candy buying spree and started a little picnic or buffet on my own. The title is clearly inspired by the PSLE question which appeared on TODAY (the newspaper). For those who know me would know that I don’t read papers, so yah it was my mom who pointed out the appearance of the question to me. Here it is, reproduced to the best of my memory:

Ken bought some chocolate and gave half of it to Jim. Jim bought some sweets and gave half of it to Ken. Jim ate 12 sweets and Ken ate 18 chocolate. The ratio of Jim’s sweets to chocolate became 1:7 while Ken’s ratio of sweets to chocolate became 1:4. How many sweets did Jim buy?

Well, according to what I remember from glancing through the article, this question was submitted by one of those kiasu and anxious parents onto some online forum (forgot which, or if it was mentioned at all). To be honest, if you want to complain about the difficulty of the paper (which I’ve seen countless searches to my blog as well as general hearsay and comments from various online sources), at least produce an example that is really difficult (like the most difficult one), or perhaps the distribution of the standards of the questions.

To be awfully honest, I’m not at all impressed by this question (is that why it seems that Straits Times hasn’t really reported on this yet?), though I agree that the English understanding will more or less determine the student’s ability to solve the question, rather than the mathematical ability. I don’t know how much the primary school syllabus has changed, but seeing that they now (started this year I think) allow calculators in paper 2, it must have undergone quite a significant change. Not that I think this (sample) question requires a calculator, whether or not it was in paper 2.

Side note: Personally, I don’t know why the syllabus had to take a change in the direction that ended up with the approval of use of calculators. I can only imagine how good the average person’s basic arithmetic calculation is using just his/her brain, or even pen and paper. No doubt in this day and age, computers and electronic gadgets with in-built basic calculator functions are widespread, that doesn’t mean that one can just forget about equipping themselves with the basic skill of counting. I know that there’s still a paper that disallows calculators but that’s pretty much like what I used to do for E Maths in secondary school, and I could already see the impacts of calculators of the person’s ability to count independently. And now they’re extending to primary schools. What a brilliant move =)

Back to main: Every single year, there are many outcries over how hard PSLE is, in particular Maths. I don’t know why. Did the syllabus really change that much? I used to think Science was the real pain due to the broadness of scope that was “testable”, but maybe now it’s different. Anyhow, I think the Maths paper shouldn’t have really blown up too much in terms of difficulty. In the first place, not everyone is capable of getting full marks (or near that) for the subject, so if the kid is unable to do/solve a small number of questions, it’s perfectly fine.

Perhaps what students need is examination stress management. Realistically speaking, not everyone will be able to do every question, much less at first glance. They really need to know how to plan their time and choose to attempt questions that they are really clueless (or stunned by) later on. Surely schools haven’t forgotten to impart (or at least attempt to) this essential skill right? Anyhow, if the formula for PSLE aggregate calculation hasn’t been changed too much, Maths is not as “heavy” as the languages which I found it to be much to my disadvantage back then in school. Lol, how come no one’s complaining about English and Chinese? Must be too easy… =P

Oh well, if my blog was earning revenue from site visits, I would have needed to thank all the students (and maybe the parents as well) for all the visits the past few days. The views on my 2 year old PSLE Maths entry contributed at least half of total daily visits recently, with a peak of 217 visits yesterday. That happened to be the highest visit count in the 3rd year of my blog. Maybe today will see a bigger traffic. Who knows. Anyhow, thanks to all these people, my total visit now is above 100k. To think when I initially wanted to blog about this it was still 99,9XX, but I couldn’t because WP was doing some maintenance work which prevented me from doing anything that involved my account (yes, not even logging in).

Woosh, I don’t know if this entry will “replace” the status of my previous one (which is like 2 years old now) because this entry’s title doesn’t contain the keywords PSLE Maths in it. Who knows it might actually become another “hot” entry for comments. Hopefully I don’t get “flamed” =X Lalala…. You can post your answer as a comment if you want to. I left out the answer on purpose since I thought it’s not hard for someone to figure it out on their own anyway.

p.s. I ended up writing a full entry on this, even though there’s only that puny question to display. I guess updates will come in a separate entry then. =P