More haste, less speed

(NST) EDUCATION Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin may remain "open to suggestions" on the decision to cap the number of subjects a student can sit for in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia, but it would be embarrassing if this leads to yet another lesson in not going off half-cocked in efforts to resolve complex and chronic issues.

Perhaps the issue of the armloads of As the more ambitious students aim for at SPM had convinced the authorities of widespread public support for limiting the number of exam subjects a student can take. With less than 10 per cent of students signing up for more than 10 subjects, the authorities believed that a cap of that number would be reasonable.

With nearly half-a-million candidates, however, this still amounts to several tens of thousands of over-achievers seeking Public Service Department scholarships on the basis of those strings of As — and that, surely, is the more pressing issue.

While on the one hand the cabinet is concerned with revamping the criteria for PSD scholarships to find as equitable as possible a balance among recognising academic merit, co-curricular activities and financial need, as well as improving transparency in the award or denial of scholarships, this peremptory imposition of a 10-subject limit seems to have come from left field as an unexpected and off-target shot: there's a deep mismatch between the proposed solution and the problem at hand. The observation that relatively few students take more than 10 subjects can too easily be turned on its head: if those numbers are to be held as negligible, why bother limiting them?

Despite public opinion for or against the matter of massive exam score sheets, that decision ultimately comes down to students and their parents. If, as in the case of 21-A scorer Azali Azlan, these are personal Everests they choose to climb as others might seek to set athletic records, it's their choice.

The media fuss made over such prodigious feats may be unseemly, but that's neither here nor there in the SPM's role as the cardinal springboard to further education. Indeed, it's a credit to the system that fifth-formers today can choose from among no fewer than 108 subjects at SPM level, allowing for a more vastly expanded field of secondary studies than their parents ever had. It would be terribly ironic for these issues to be perpetuated because something done to settle one controversy only digs up other bones of contention.