In the Malaysian school system, the performance of each school in the public examinations is measured by the average numeric grade, in which the lower the better is the performance. This is because the grades A, B, C etc is designated 1,2,3 etc. Each year awards are given to schools which show vast improvement over the previous year. But not many people are aware of the flaws of the present award system. If we study literature on school effectiveness, we would know that the yearly academic achievement is to a large extent influenced by the entry qualifications of the pupils. On a good year you may get students with good results but on another, students with poor results which will effectively influence your school public exam results in a number of years from now. What is more important is the measure of “school effects” – to what extent the results of the students are attributed to the efforts of the school. This can be measured to a certain degree of accuracy using sophisticated statistical methods and has been carried out in Britain for many years already. If we check on the BBC website, we can find the ranking of schools based on the public examination results and also on “contextual value added”(CVA) – the measure of the “school effects”. We will find that there are schools ranked very high in their academic results but mediocre in the CVA – an indication that the good academic results is due to intake of good students and not due to the effort of the school.
Tags: academic achievement, contextual value added, ranking of schools, school effectiveness
