Grade Five hurdle

Lal Fonseka, Productivity Consultant, Brandix Lanka Limited

The Grade 5 scholarship results are just out and cut-off mark had been declared as 156. Nearly around 10 percent have been able to exceed and 90 percent have been disappointed in the process. Now there is no point in being disappointed because of your child’s inability to get pass the grade five scholarship examination. Now it is all over. Prepare for the next examination.

The only failure that you are currently facing is not being able to get your child into a popular school. Still your children could proceed with their further studies and the next examination they face is the O-L.

The grade five scholarship examination is so difficult to get through because those who sit for the examination are just around 10 years of age. The pressures their small brains undergo are unbelievable for a child of in this age.

Especially the parents take tremendous effort to stuff their little brains from the tender age of eight.

This is the period children like to play with their friends but their childhood is deprived by the parents without knowing how much harm they are inflicting on their own children.

If you go through the process of how these children are getting ready for the grade five exam, you will be amazed that they start from the age of eight. The Grade Five scholarship exam is designed to cram enough material into a child’s head that would be considered child-abuse in any decent society.

We applaud 10 to 15 children who top the exam and forget the nearly 265,000 children just because they did not do well, though a majority of them have scored over 100 points in the same exam.

Most significant characteristics of this exam that even though a child scores 150 points for both the subjects (75 points for each), the result sheet indicates that he or she is not qualified which can be a huge blow to a child.

Take Mario Capeechi, one of the three Noble laureates for medicine in 2007, who did not start school until he was almost nine years of age, having been separated from his family during the war. Even the parents of these children are well aware that they take part in this activity of ‘child abuse’. So why push our children, when we know that late bloomers can shine and early bloomers can wither and flop?

The pushing that begins from the kindergarten to primary school gets more intense at the end of Grade 11 as children face their first public exam. In my view the GCE (O/L) exam at the end of grade 11 is only the beginning of a life preparing for future exams.

We all know that students can’t pass an exam by doing nothing but exactly ‘how much’ do they need to do to pass? This, of course, varies in accordance to their own level of commitment, how difficult the subject is as well as the teacher’s competence. However, there is a simple way to systemize the process by dividing it into three categories.

Where are you now?

Start out by asking them how much they have studied. Try to give a quantitative measure of how much progress they have made so far, for instance by assigning a number from 0 to10 on how ready they are to face the exam.

If they are unsure of how much they know, I would recommend them to sit a mock exam to access their readiness. When it is done, count the number of points scored and the percentage (points achieved divided by all points). The higher the percentage the better prepared they are.

In this case, a mock exam does not mean a single exam. Children should do at least 150 questions which had been prepared by the various scholars based on the previous years’ question papers.

Where do you want to go?

The second step is quite obvious. Once they’ve decided where they ‘stand’ they need to know where to ‘go’. Do they wish to achieve a higher grade or simply pass the exam? If all they want is to pass this particular test without caring for a higher grade, then studying for that outcome would make sense, right?

WRONG! You see, even if their intention is to simply pass the exam, they should never study for that goal. If they aim that low, chances are that they may land even lower but if they were to aim a little bit higher and fall short, they will still pass the exam!

There’s an old Swedish Proverb: ‘Aim for the stars and you’ll hit the forest’

How to get there?

In order to pass the exam they need to master the essentials. Every subject has some fundamental concepts that have to be understood. Be sure to go through (a) textbook and notes (b) past exam papers (a must!) and try to find the most important concepts. Start out by learning these, there is no point in trying to understand the advanced topics if you have not mastered the basics.

Once they have done this you are ready to move on to more advanced material. If they only wish to pass the exam, I’d recommend them to try to memorize the easier ones leaving the complicated ones behind. If their intention (as it perhaps should be…) is to receive a higher grade then they should go through the complicated ones as well. I’d recommend collecting all the questions on a piece of paper so they won’t need to look for the teacher every time something new comes up.

As long as the exam is not due any time soon, they have time to study. Of course, it is always better to study a little every day during a long time span than it is to study a lot in a short time. Try your best to study a little every day; it is so much easier to do that than is to carry the burden of knowing that the test is tomorrow and that you’re unprepared.

Remember once again your children are in the age range of 10 years. They prefer to play rather than prepare for an exam for three years. Whatever said and done, this is a one time examination. Organize their studies with a personal study planner and then follow it as strictly as possible.

It is way too easy to get distracted by TV, movies or the like. This doesn’t mean they should study from morning to evening without doing anything else, it simply means they should learn to ‘prioritize’.

List things in order of their importance and finally, whatever they do, don’t allow them to procrastinate!