There is a post on FB about how a student, when asked in an exam to state a similarity between a bull and a lion after observing their pictures, was marked wrong when she answered that they are both mammals. The reasoning was that the question explicitly tests observation skills and the students are supposed to infer based on the picture and not based on their own general knowledge. Of course, angry parents denounced the question and expectedly people began commenting vociferously about the inflexible school system which we have in Singapore.

To me, the root of the problem is that it is difficult to state explicitly in the instructions what you want, especially when it is a question targetted at P3 students. The question is flawed, certainly, although I am not sure what is a better way to set the question given what the setter wants to test. What amused me more, though, was the insistence that this is a manifestation of our inflexible education system.

Examinations are necessarily inflexible. They are meant to be fair, impartial methods of assessment, where the same marks will be awarded to a particular answer regardless of who the marker is. Examinations have a place in any education system, and having inflexible examinations does not necessarily entail having an inflexible education system.  The problem is when the education system is so centred around examinations at the expense of other assessment methods, or even worse, at the expense of teaching and learning. That should be what we are concerned about, and not over particular questions in examinations, which are just there to help a teacher assess how much a student has learnt.

Far too often, the criticism goes on to comment about how our inflexible school system results in students who are not creative and that teachers do not teach students how to be creative. My first response to that would be: I am not sure if creativity can be taught and it can only be, at best, nurtured by allowing opportunities. My second response would be: I am not sure if Singaporean students are ready for creativity and less examination-centred education system. Just look at how PW turned out. To most Singaporeans, creativity is just a convenient excuse which they use whenever they are unhappy with the education system. Having a more tolerant and less rigid marking scheme does not really help to nurture creativity.  "GP teachers force us to write in a certain way! This inhibits my creativity!" I have heard this accusation far too often. All I can say is - creativity does not mean writing in any way that you deem fit. Academic writing has certain requirements which scholars and researchers all over the world adhere to, and for good reason. Writing a rambling, disorganised, irrelevant and poorly expressed essay is not being creative - it is simply an ineffective way of writing.

Another FB comment which caught my eye was this. "When I was in primary school, I wrote 'My age is nine years old' in a composition and my English teacher marked me wrong, crossing out my sentence in red and writing above it 'I am nine years old.' The English HOD of another school said that there was nothing wrong with my original sentence. My English teacher was just too rigid and inflexible."

Yes, there might be nothing grammatically wrong with "My age is nine years old", but I cannot imagine any circumstance where a native English speaker would use this sentence. Even if I were to ask you "What is your age?", it is very unlikely that the answer would be "My age is X years old." It is an unnatural construction which signals prominently the fact that the speaker is really not very good at using English naturally. It would be irresponsible of the English not to point this out to the student. Language learning is far more than not making grammatical errors and expressing meaning accurately, a concept which seems to have eluded the English HOD and the person who posted this comment.