by Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and MP for Tanjung, Lim Kit Siang, in Petaling Jaya on Saturday, 14th March, 1992:
The Examinations Syndicate should release the results of the re-marking of the 1991 SPM Bahasa Malaysia paper latest by end of April and not four months later in mid-July to allow successful students to join Form Six classes with minimal disruptions.
A spokesman of the Examinations Syndicate said that candidates who have appealedd for a re-marking of the 1991 SPM Bahasa Malaysia paper would get their results at the latest by July 15, 1992.
This is most shocking because this means that, the Examinations Syndicate is giving itself about four long months for the remarking of the 1991 SPM Bahasa Malaysia paper, completely heedless of the hardships this will cause to students, who are hoping to get into Form Six classes which begin on April 12/13.
This does not speak highly either for the sense of responsibility or urgency or the efficiency of the Examinations Syndicate.
If the Examinations Syndicate takes four months to mark and release the SPM results of 169,269 candidates, why must it also take four months to re-mark, not all subjects but one paper of a small percentage of the candidates?
The unusual phenomenon in the results of the 1991 SPM results released a fortnight ago is that several schools in Penang and Selangor find the Bahasa Malaysia result of their students most shocking and unexpected. These students have done well in the SPM, except in Bahasa Malaysia although they have done well in this subject during the school gradings. As a result, these students could not enter the Sixth Form because they failed to obtain a credit for Bahasa Malaysia.
In Chung Ling National Type Secondary School in Penang, for instance, some 200 students have appealed against the SPM Bahasa Malaysia papers. It has also been reported that the pass rate for Bahasa Malaysia paper for Confucian National Type Secondary School in Kuala Lumpur had plunged from 95.9 per cent in the 1990 SPM to 64 per cent.
In another top high school in Penang, 100 of the schools’s top 557 students who took the SPM last year had made the appeal. The school’s pass rate for last year had dropped to 11.34 per cent from 86.34 per cent in 1990.
In another top Penang school, 30 students had appealed for a re-mark of the Bahasa Malaysia paper and this is the highest ever. In this school, 44 of the total 270 students could have gotten Grade One certificate if not for obtaining a pass for the subject.
From the efficiency point of view, there is no reason why all the results of candidates who have appealed for a re-marking for the SPM Bahasa Malaysia paper could not he released by end of April. This deadline is doubly important to ensure that there is a minimal of disruption for students who would be entitled to join Form Six classes after the re-marking of the Bahasa Malaysia paper.