The re­cent hul­la­baloo about ques­tion 35 on the SEA math­e­mat­ics pa­per has il­lus­trat­ed many of the ills in our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and ex­plained much of what I've been com­plain­ing about over the last 20 years or so. First, let's look at the of­fend­ing ques­tion: "$8.25 was shared be­tween Pam and her sis­ter Ri­ta in pro­por­tion to their ages. Pam is 12 years old and Ri­ta is 8 years old.

(a) Ex­press their ages as a ra­tio in its SIM­PLEST form. (1 mark)

(b) Cal­cu­late the amount of mon­ey EACH girl re­ceives. (2 marks)

My first re­ac­tion was that if our 11 and 12 year olds, who are as­pir­ing to get in­to their first-choice schools, can­not do this ques­tion then heav­en help us all. It means that our pen­chant to dumb-down ex­ams at all lev­els so that mediocre stu­dents can look bright con­tin­ues un­abat­ed.Then I heard peo­ple say­ing that "ra­tio" and "pro­por­tion" were not on the syl­labus. But, then, I hear that "frac­tions" are on the syl­labus. For­give me, but I do not un­der­stand how one can teach frac­tions with­out men­tion­ing the words "ra­tio" and "pro­por­tion." Every dic­tio­nary and the­saurus I checked list­ed "ra­tio," "pro­por­tion" and "per­cent­age" as syn­onyms for "frac­tion." One gave the mean­ing of "frac­tion" as "the ra­tio of two num­bers oth­er than ze­ro."

I mean to say, you will teach a child about nu­mer­a­tor, de­nom­i­na­tor and quo­tient and think that "ra­tio" is too com­pli­cat­ed a word for them to un­der­stand? I shud­der to think that we have teach­ers who are un­aware of the con­nec­tion be­tween frac­tion, ra­tio and pro­por­tion.In my book, if "frac­tion" is on the syl­labus, "ra­tio" and "pro­por­tion" are. The words do not have to be men­tioned ex­plic­it­ly. It is like de­mand­ing that every word that can ap­pear on the Eng­lish ex­am must be list­ed on the syl­labus. Sure­ly stu­dents who have a wide vo­cab­u­lary should be ex­pect­ed to fare bet­ter than those who don't.There was fur­ther ev­i­dence that this was a per­fect­ly valid ques­tion. The min­istry's re­lease stat­ed that Ques­tion 35 was based on ob­jec­tive 53, Sec­tion B–mon­ey–which re­quires stu­dents to "solve prob­lems in­volv­ing di­rect pro­por­tions." Q 35 deals with mon­ey and "di­rect pro­por­tion"–the old­er child gets more. How can any­one com­plain that it's un­fair? I've read where some­one said that this meant that the ques­tion must be asked in a cer­tain way! Q 35 asked it dif­fer­ent­ly so it was un­fair!

Then there are teach­ers who claim that the top­ic was tak­en off the syl­labus in 2003. Re­al­ly? Were frac­tions tak­en off? Their rea­son? That such a ques­tion has not ap­peared on an ex­am since 2003. Clear­ly, these are teach­ers who teach to the ex­am, drilling stu­dents to an­swer ques­tions based on a pat­tern rather than teach the ba­sic math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples of the top­ics.This ex­plains why a stu­dent can make al­most 100 per cent in maths in May, yet in Sep­tem­ber their teacher at their pres­tige high school can com­plain that they can't do ba­sic arith­metic. It al­so ex­plains why many uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents do not know their mul­ti­pli­ca­tion ta­bles nor can they ma­nip­u­late frac­tions.For­tu­nate­ly, among the com­plain­ers, were some lev­el-head­ed ones. I would par­tic­u­lar­ly like to men­tion Kezia Re­ece, a prin­ci­pal from St Au­gus­tine, who made some of the most sen­si­ble com­ments I've heard on the mat­ter. Among these were "the syl­labus cov­ers ra­tios in re­la­tion to frac­tions," "some schools (teach­ers) are not teach­ing from the syl­labus, but on the book­lets (ex­ams)," "they are teach­ing for SEA, not sec­ondary school" and "we are con­don­ing medi­oc­rity."

Our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem could cer­tain­ly do with more prin­ci­pals with that view.Q 35 was per­fect for sep­a­rat­ing the thinkers from the re­gur­gi­ta­tors. Sad­ly, once again, we missed a gold­en op­por­tu­ni­ty to send the right mes­sage to par­ents, teach­ers and stu­dents. Rather, we pre­ferred to bend over back­wards to de­ny ini­tia­tive and re­ward medi­oc­rity.The re­moval of Q 35 from the maths pa­per will dis­ad­van­tage pre­cise­ly those we should be re­ward­ing. At the same time, it re­wards those who were not good enough to know that wast­ing time on a ques­tion they say they knew noth­ing about amount­ed to poor ex­am tech­nique.Per­haps we would have done well to re­mem­ber the say­ing–"we can­not im­prove our­selves by bring­ing down oth­ers."

Noel Kalicha­ran