Entrance Examination Tweaking

I remembered a few months ago our Educational Minister was talking about tweaking the public government entrance examination to be changed in which the CGPA of the student would have effect on the placement. He claimed that the students are too stressed out from cramming for the entrance examination and that they should relax more and rely less on cramming schools. His initiative was to add CGPA is the grading criteria for the entrance exam.

Though on a hindsight this may look good on surface I do want to point out a very big pitfall on how this measure will backfire and ruin the whole secondary educational system. The first point that I want to mention is that parents select secondary schools from how famous they are, and which universities their graduate go to. As the list of universities they attended is one important criteria in selection of schools, we can see that many schools will be pressed to make sure their students enter the best schools as possible. What happens in return with this new policy is that schools will go to the process of what we call "grade inflation". Grade Inflation is a phenomenon that we are seeing of the late in educational circles - and in this example we can see that by lowing the grading criteria to improve the GPA of all the students, the school can inadvertedly promote the chances of their students to join better universities. Now that would self defeat the process of the evaluation system itself that has been a major problem. We can see that in our schools there are no standardized test that are validated or accepted in Thailand. Due to that void, there is no way that we can measure quantitatively the quality of GPA from different schools. This is a major reason why I would say polling the GPA with the entrance exam would be a very bad idea to implement due to the earlier constraint. Though it might be argued that the setup of an agreed standardized test for secondary level could be used as an weight in the entrance exam, as noted our own education minister's henchman, was accused of stealing entrance exam papers for the daughter of a very influential person in the government.

I wanted to point out though the person was proven not guilty by a biased panel and proof of wrong-doing could be tampered to the point that an acquittance is impossible, the very shock from the events could continue in the earlier point - the standardized test would not be sacred as there would be someone who will attempt to steal the paper for some influential person's son/daughter - and make this criteria useless again.

Sigh... Useless, Clueless, and Moral-less...