Grading our own homework: SPM success and global reality
The Ministry of Education recently celebrated the 2025 SPM results, highlighting a steady improvement in the National Grade Average. While we congratulate this cohort of students for their hard work, for many sceptics familiar with the standard administrative sound bites, several uncomfortable questions come to mind.
How is it that the first SPM batch to have never sat for a major high-stakes exam in their lives outperformed all their predecessors? How is it that our schools are churning out record numbers of “A” grades, yet when these same students are measured against international standards, we consistently miss the mark?
We are witnessing a widening chasm between the ministry’s paper success and the global reality of our children’s competency. The truth is stark: The Malaysian national school system is no longer a choice of preference for those who can afford otherwise; it has become a choice of financial necessity.
The most telling sign of this trust deficit is the surge in private and international school enrolments, alongside the increasing preference for Chinese vernacular schools (SJKC) among Malay parents. Over the last five years, we have seen a quiet but massive exodus from the national system. International schools are no longer the exclusive domain of the elite. Since 2021, enrolment in international schools by local Malaysian students has surged by more than 44%, now exceeding 75,000 students. Similarly, SJKCs are seeing a steady rise in non-Chinese enrolment, which now hovers around 21.5%.
Meanwhile, national school enrolment in urban centres either remains stagnant or is declining. Parents are not leaving because they want to; they are leaving because they feel they must. They are squeezing their belts, sacrificing retirement savings and family stability to pay for a quality of education that the state should, by right, be providing for free.
Why this lack of faith? While our local SPM grades magically improve year after year, our 15-year-olds’ global standing in Mathematics and Science has plummeted to levels that place them years behind their peers in Singapore and Vietnam. Even Brunei is now ranked higher than us.
We are grading our own homework and giving ourselves an “A”, while the rest of the world sees a different story. This is the heart of the trust deficit. When a “Straight A” SPM student enters a global university or a high-tech workforce and finds he lacks the critical thinking and English proficiency required to compete, the system has failed him.
The yearly improvement in SPM serves as a useful administrative metric for the ministry, but the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) acts as a stress test that reveals whether those grades translate into actual global competitiveness. Malaysian students often struggle not because they lack Mathematics or Science facts, but because they have not been trained to navigate questions that fall outside a standard SPM template.
The SPM is designed to test mastery of a specific national syllabus; it rewards the recall of facts and the ability to answer predictable formats found in 10-year series papers. The PISA, conversely, measures functional literacy — the ability to apply knowledge to unfamiliar, real-world problems.
Another significant contributor to this trust fracture is policy inconsistency, specifically the ongoing battle of the Dual Language Programme (DLP). We request that the government be transparent and resolve the DLP drama once and for all. If a parent wants Science and Mathematics taught in English, and the school has the capacity, they should be allowed to proceed without annual bureaucratic hurdles. Schools should make a progressive effort to expand the DLP based on parental demand.
The 2024 DLP mandate requiring at least one Malay-medium class in every school, regardless of parent demand, is bureaucratic in nature. It signals that political quotas are more important than a child's readiness for the semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) industries. It defines that parents’ wishes are irrelevant, directly contradicting the spirit of the Education Act 1996.
The economic clock is ticking
The implications of this stagnation are not just academic; they are existential. Under the New Industrial Master Plan (NIMP) 2030, we are betting our future on becoming a high-tech, high-value economy. But one cannot build a semiconductor hub or an AI centre with a workforce that struggles with basic PISA-level Mathematics and global language proficiency.
If we do not fix the national school system, we are condemning Malaysia to the middle-income trap. We risk remaining as the factory floor of Southeast Asia, providing the labour but never the leadership, while our neighbours leapfrog us. Furthermore, our best and brightest who are educated in private silos will eventually contribute to the nation’s brain drain as they look to foreign shores for their futures.
The most glaring and unsettling product of this political tug-of-war is the creation of a dual-track Malaysian society. One track is for the affluent, who are globally connected, tech-savvy and English-proficient. The other track is for everyone else — reduced to grades and numbers in a national system that is merely getting by. This is a recipe for social fragmentation and political polarisation.
When the shared space of the national school disappears, so does the foundation of national unity.
The National Education Plan 2026-2035 cannot be another exercise in ticking boxes. It must be the moment we stop managing the decline and start building the ascent. If national schools are not the first choice for the middle class, they will eventually be the right choice for no one.
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