Confession of a SPM Student!

 

The bell curve (or grading on a curve) is a statistical method used by teachers and exam boards to assign grades based on how a pupil’s score compared to the rest of the exam taker rather than using a fixed, absolute score. This method of assigning grades was offered as the reason why Sarawakian Threads user @clrxdaxy was able to score an ‘A’ in her Additional Mathematics paper during the 2022 SPM examinations. This was despite her doing next to nothing to deserve that score given that she had copied the questions as answers while leaving the other half of the test paper unanswered. 

Looking back, a bewildered full-time banker “could never understand” how he could score an ‘A+” for add math which he had little hope of while he only scored a “B+” for Bahasa Malaysia which “I always got A’s throughout Form Four with even an A+ during my (SPM) trial exam”. The ‘bell curve’ marking scheme was named a guilty party in causing such distortions in grading. It was surmised that this method would be employed to “help weaker pupils” – an insinuation that the threshold for an “A” must have been very low for that year.

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exam 

Another commenter further explained it with hypothetical numbers to further illustrate how a very low mark can end up being a graded higher than expected. It was also mentioned by an examinations system expert that the person marking the paper was not the same as the person grading it. This is regardless of the paper have been marked according to an approved marking scheme. 

It was thus surmised that such delusionary grades, unfortunately, led some pupils to apply for tertiary programmes that are unsuited to their skillset. This further affected university undergraduates who were then unable to answer psychometric test questions or write essays on scholarship application forms even though they were supposed to be “straight As” pupils. 

One netizen from across the Causeway highlighted that the opposite scenario existed in Singapore. A bell curve was also employed but too many high scorers led to such marks being downgraded, much to the horror of the original poster who perhaps realised her situation wasn’t so bad after all. It was also surmised that if a pupil were to opt for just one same answer for all the multiple-choice questions (without even reading them), he or she would have a very good chance of passing. 

The hard reality was spelled out by one pessimistic commenter who didn’t feel the need to varnish the bitter truth when it was opined that “Malaysia likely doesn’t have a bell curve anymore but probably a downhill curve these days”. Do you think Malaysia has a future with integrity lost in exams? Why do we do it? To “shiok sendiri”? Is this also prevalent in matriculation and local universities? Now with AI do we need exams? Bring a phone to an exam hall and answer all questions for A+? This distortion perpetuates into the workplace and amplifies the lack of quality in work output. No one can trust the SPM results or the local university. Each employer will design their own entry exams for their sphere of work. 

Reference:

Intriguing confession from SPM days: I didn’t answer half my add maths paper yet I still score “A”, Focus Malaysia, 12 October 2026