Today marks the end of my school attachments, and I was told to not go to CCSS because today is Teacher Marking Day. All of the teachers will finish up the marking (grading) of the semester exams that they administered over the past two weeks. Even though it is the end of the school attachments, I still have plans to visit the schools again for informal visits over the next few weeks. The official end of my Fulbright program is not until June. I’ll be working on my project, my summative report, and my workshop presentation (!) over the new few weeks as well.

As I mentioned above, the teachers at CCSS are ‘marking the papers’ (that’s the way we say ‘grading tests’) today, or just finishing up all the marking, as they have been working on them since the testing started at the beginning of last week. I have not fully written on just how serious the testing culture is here in Singapore. For these semester exams, all the students of a particular level are gathered in the school hall for each subject’s exam, while regular classes are suspended for two weeks. They sit in singleton desks, in long rows and aligned aisles, all facing the front of the hall. Teachers are assigned invigilations for different exam periods. An invigilation sounds so much more serious than merely proctoring, doesn’t it? I’ve seen how multiple teachers walk slowly up and down the aisles of desks, watching the students take the tests. This image does not match with my image of a US proctor: one teacher assigned to a classroom full of students, and who usually stays seated at the front of the room. I always thought that the pacing up and down the rows and isles was distracting, but I supposed that the students here are accustomed to it. They are accustomed to the length of the exams, too. Each subject’s exam could consist of one or two papers, with each paper being 2 – 2.5 hours each. Most students have been doing semester exams like this since Primary 3. (This is quite the contrast from my own 3rd grader’s experience at the international school. For the first time since we’ve been here, she finally mentioned that she had a “summative assessment” recently. I have not heard how she performed on it.)

The testing focus here is partially due to the importance of the O-level exams that students take at the end of either 4 years (Express stream) or 5 years (Normal stream) of secondary school. The length of the testing, the structure of the exams’ two papers, the format of the exam questions themselves, the invigilations, the marking, and the feedback all point to the gravity of O-level exams. I’ve seen how teachers model questions off of previous exams. I have witnessed how a group of teachers debate for 30 minutes how to mark part (d) of a question on a common class assessment, which is a test leading up to the semester exams. After such a debate, the teachers decided to change the point allocation from one whole point to half of a point for that particular part of multi-part question. I’ve talked to teachers about how they collaborate on the setting (writing) of the semester exams months in advance, how they submit them to administrators for approval, and how they write the papers for the classes they are NOT teaching at the time. In my formal interviews and informal conversations with teachers, they consistently reference the exams and the syllabus and how the focus of their teaching is on the student improvement on the former and the teacher completion of the latter. Testing is no joke here.

Since I don’t have a formal school attachment, I worked from home this morning, went to a fantastic yoga class and then had lunch in our south dining room. The  friendly proprietor of stall 22 asked me where my daughters were today. (It’s nice to go where they recognize me, right?) “At school,” I smiled in my reply. “Good, good! They study, ah! Study, study!” Yes, I think they are studying. I guess I can’t be too sure since I haven’t heard them talking about any exams. Of course, I am just kidding…I think.