Journal

PSLE Math

The day before, one of my friends posed the following mathematical problem to me:

Jim bought some chocolates and gave half of it to Ken. Ken bought some sweets and gave half of it to Jim. Jim ate 12 sweets and Ken ate 18 chocolates. The ratio of Jim’s sweets to chocolates became 1:7 and the ratio of Ken’s sweets to chocolates became 1:4. How many sweets did Ken buy?

I took a few minutes to work it out. (Basically, starting with Jim’s current sweets as x and chocolates as 7x, you can work out all of the numbers in terms of x, and I eventually got the relationship x + 12 = (7x – 18)/4. That’ll eventually give you x = 22 and a final answer of 68.)

Figuring that it was a primary school question, I asked about it. She’s been teaching tuition.

In the evening, my mom was reading the Chinese newspaper, and I took a peek at it. The article about the PSLE examinations caught my attention. It seemed that, like with every other year’s there was some complaining about the difficulty of papers. This year, the main problem appeared to be the Math paper, and I looked and it happened to be this question.

I only scanned through the paper briefly, but it did seem to say that a bunch of teachers had found the question difficult, in that they couldn’t figure it out in a reasonable time. (I believe the article said that it took a couple of days.) Then in yesterday’s Today, I saw a similar comment in the letters page (or forum, or whatever they’d like to call it), that some teachers didn’t think it was really, uhm, shall we say, doable.

Which I wanted to mention because it seemed fairly surprising. Hullabaloo aside, it didn’t really seem to be all that challenging, now, did it? That is, of course, making no comment on whether or not it was of an appropriate difficulty for primary school students and whether or not they had the means to do it comfortably. (Primary school students, as I recall, know no algebra, but draw the bar chart thing I think they call a model.) I just found it slightly surprising.

Of course, I might have misread all of it and they meant the other parts of the paper, but in that case I don’t know why the Chinese paper would highlight this particular problem (it was on Channel NewsAsia too!) and even provide solutions. It doesn’t appear to go beyond basic algebra.

I’m sure I just misunderstood everything that’s been said so far and they were merely making points on how it was difficult for primary school students specifically (and not everyone in general). And apart from that, I think this has all been blown a little out of proportion. I’ve seen comments on breaking the spirits of young students, and it being of an exaggerated difficulty such that it stumps even adults. I don’t believe any of this is the case and it’s a little sad that we’re talking about any of this at all.

Though, let’s see what question next year’s paper throws up.

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.