07/10/2025

TUESDAY | OCT 7, 2025

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Malaysian Paper www.thesun.my RM1.00 PER COPY — page 5 Jaw-dropping shift Report on h page 3 Grade expectations: Pass low, aim lower “When passing becomes meaningless, excellence becomes optional. Teachers lose drive, students lose direction and parents lose faith. And one day, we will all wonder why our ‘graduates’ can’t write an email without emojis or confusion. M A R I N A T E D M A K C I K B Y A Z U R A A B A S No. 8929 PP 2644/12/2012 (031195) A lower pass mark, combined with automatic progression, risks eroding the sense of competition that once motivated students. – AMIRUL SYAFIQ/THESUN Claims that passing grade for school assessments lowered to 20% under Ujian Akhir Sesi Akademik rattle parents and educators, with some warning such threshold could affect students’ motivation and learning habits. waiting to board flight to Mumbai.

A DOI , anak-anak semua rejoice! Apparently, you can now pass with 20%. Yes, dua puluh peratus saja – that is right – you can practically spell your name wrong and still get a “Good job, keep it up!” If this sounds like satire, it’s not; it’s Malaysia, 2025 edition – where exams are starting to look more like self esteem workshops than assessments. And if you think Makcik ’s exaggerating, just look at the theSun ’s front page on Sept 30, where the nation’s collective jaw is still on the floor. (Pssst... it’s still up on the iPaper if you need proof.) Once upon a time, 40% was the line between “ok- lah ” and “prepare your last rites”. Your mother would storm into your room with your report card like it was a crime scene file. But now? We are told 20% is enough to pass. Even TikTok dance challenges have higher entry requirements, sayang . Let’s unpack this academic nasi lemak , shall we? A score of 20% used to mean you studied the wrong syllabus, panicked halfway and wrote “God bless me” in the essay section. It was the academic equivalent of “ eh , at least I tried”. But now, that same effort supposedly earns a passing grade. Wah, what an era – we have officially rebranded failure as progress. It’s giving “group therapy disguised as policy”. You show up, scribble something vaguely relevant and the system pats your head like a confused cat: “You tried, kan ? So, pass- lah .” Hold your horses, Makcik isn’t a monster; she believes in kindness, empathy and not traumatising Such was the threat shouted through the front door of our New York City apartment, where my mother and I lived in the 1950s. There was also frequent pounding on the door at 3am with further threats and obscenities. My mother’s offence? Being one of the first female journalists to cover the Middle East, a region barely known at that time to most Americans. My mother Nexhmie Zaimi was born in Albania, a former province of the Ottoman Empire. She was the first girl in Albania to go to high school, which was run by Presbyterian missionaries. She was also a natural-born rebel. She scandalised the capital, Tirana, by refusing to wear a veil and speaking of emigrating to the United States.

children with red ink. But there is a fine line between being compassionate and being complacent. And my dear, this 20%- to-pass idea doesn’t blur that line; it pole-dances on it. If 20% is now considered “passing”, what message are we sending? That effort doesn’t matter and mediocrity is acceptable as long as it is wrapped in pastel-coloured “mental health” packaging? Because let’s be honest, not every low mark is a cry for help. Sometimes, it is just the result of not studying. Picture this: “Don’t worry, doc, I know you only got 20% in anatomy but you passed!” Next thing you know, you wake up from surgery missing your appendix, wallet and sense of security. Or imagine an engineer who scraped through with 20% in physics. The bridge he designs won’t just collapse; it will qualify as a modern art installation, titled “Falling Standards”. Even the makciks at pasar malam know better. If your kuih turns out right only 20% of the time, you don’t sell it; you fix the recipe. Standards matter- lah . When you lower the bar so far that it is grazing the floor tiles, you are not lifting people up; you are teaching them to trip gracefully. Maybe the intention is noble. Maybe someone in the ministry thought: “Let’s reduce the stigma of failure and nurture confidence.” Beautiful words, darling, but inclusivity without quality is just pity in PowerPoint form. You can call it “modern grading” but if a student who barely attempts the paper walks away with a pass, we She managed to get to the US and, somehow, was enrolled at the prestigious Wellesley College. There, she wrote a stellar book, Daughter of the Eagle , about growing up in semi feudal Albania. It became a national best-seller. My mother then attended Columbia University Journalism school, when it was still a bastion of free speech. She met my father, a New York City attorney, married him before the war and soon became a journalist and lecturer. She also worked with the predecessor of the CIA in early post-war years, then began reporting on the Middle East for the US State Department. In the 1950s, she warned Washington that unless the Palestine problem was resolved with justice, the Middle East would erupt in fury against the US. That came in 2001. My mother was a star journalist despite her grave eye problems. On her

The front page headline of theSun on Sept 30 shows a school-based exam passing mark of 20%, triggering public controversy.

are not helping them succeed; we are handing out delusions like door gifts. And what about the hardworking students – the ones who actually study until their eyebags qualify for EPF? The ones who survive on Maggi, panic and pure caffeine? They will get lumped together with those who wrote “I don’t know” in beautiful cursive. How is that fair? You can’t flatten effort like you flatten chapati. It kills motivation faster than a Friday evening “urgent” email from the boss. What’s next? A 10% pass mark because “we must nurture self esteem”? Exams, where all multiple choice answers are correct? “Just choose what resonates with your truth”? We have entered the era of “bare minimum”. Tagline: “Why aim high when you can pass low?” This isn’t empowerment; it is quiet own, with no support, she managed to interview Egypt’s ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jordan’s King Hussein, Egypt’s old ruler King Farouk, Egypt’s former president Anwar El-Sadat, Egyptian army officer and statesman General Naguib and Iraq’s former prime minister and strongman, Nuri al-Said. While travelling in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, my mother was shocked to discover hundreds of thousands (750,000 in total) of Palestinian villagers who had been driven from their homes at gunpoint or by premeditated massacres by Jewish regular and irregular forces. These refugees were living in cardboard boxes or metal sheds, many starving and ill. My mother began writing and lecturing about their plight. What had become Northern Israel (the Arab region of Galilee and Haifa) “was a land without people for a people without land”, as the Zionist party line went. A catchy phrase but wholly untrue.

surrender – the academic version of “ malas nak gaduh ”. Because here’s the truth, sayang : a low bar doesn’t lift the weak; it weakens everyone. When passing becomes meaningless, excellence becomes optional. Teachers lose drive, students lose direction and parents lose faith. And one day, we will all wonder why our “graduates” can’t write an email without emojis or confusion. Education isn’t supposed to be easy; it is supposed to be transformative. A pass mark should mean something – that you have understood, not that you have existed. We don’t need more pity passes; we need passion, rigour and systems that actually teach students how to think, not just how to be graded. Because when the real world hits – with deadlines, bosses, clients and

bills – nobody’s handing out 20% pity passes. If the powers-that-be truly want to build resilient students, then stop adjusting the goalposts. Build classrooms that excite, teachers who inspire and policies that make sense outside ministry memos. And if you’re reading this and thinking, “Cannot be- lah ”, then grab that copy of theSun – with the front page bright and bold. The numbers are there. The debate is real. The standards, sadly, are not. Until then, Makcik will be here, sipping her teh tarik , shaking her head with love and disbelief, muttering, “You pass with 20%, I can pass out already.” Because Malaysia deserves better, and so do our kids. AzuraAbas is the associate editor of theSun. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com

The Middle East road to nowhere: Where peace remains a mirage “STOP writing about the Middle East or we will throw acid in your face and your son’s.” Israeli historians have amply chronicled the ethnic cleansing of northern Palestine. Many of its people ended up in the open-air prison camp of Gaza, where they are today victims of brutal ethnic terrorism. I am firmly in the camp of those Israelis who understand that they must, some day, live with their Palestinian neighbours. Ű BY ERIC S. MARGOLIS the Palestinians, who have become martyrs.

Pro-Israel advertisers in the newspapers and radio stations that carried my mother’s reports threatened to stop their advertisements unless she was silenced. She refused to be quiet – until the threats came to throw acid in my face. I have had my columns and broadcasts blacklisted by major US and Canadian newspapers, radio and television for my heretical pro-peace views on the Middle East – and my life threatened numerous times. After 60 years of threats and intimidation, I have learned to live with them. Even many former right-wing partisans of Israel are beginning to re evaluate their thinking as the world turns against Israel’s final solution to

I salute the great Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who advocated this peaceful course for decades. The partisans of ever greater Israel are on a road to nowhere. They have managed to get their strongest supporter, President Donald Trump, into the White House but where does he go from there? My mother died in 2003 in Santa Barbara, California, where she had retired. At that time, she was nursing Bosnian children wounded in the Balkan War. Many hailed her as“the first lady of Albania”. EricS. Margolis is a syndicated columnist. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com