Earlier this month, education officials held a ceremony for every Cambodian 12th-grader who got an A on this year’s graduation exam.
They didn’t need to rent an auditorium or even a big room. There were only three students.
Of the 47,122 students who took the July exam, just three got an overall grade of A. Only 28 got B’s, and 435 got C’s. Four thousand and four got D’s, and 14,198 got E’s. The rest—60 percent of all test-takers—failed.
This may come as little surprise to many Cambodians, who are accustomed to just a handful of students doing extremely well on the test each year. More of a surprise is the extremely high failure rate this year—last year, only one-third failed.
Cambodia is not alone among nations in having a quirky and perhaps seriously flawed exam grading system. But the grade distribution makes it difficult for schools and employers to distinguish between good and merely average students, education experts say. And the arbitrary nature of the grading may unfairly shut students out of university.
The tough grading system was inherited from the French, who established Cambodia’s formal education system during colonial times, said Pok Than, Ministry of Education secretary of state for higher education. “They had a very selective and competitive exam,” he said. “They think the more selective the exam, the better quality the exam is.”
French grading remains strict, oriented toward a small number of students at a very high level, said Philippe Peycam, French-born director of the Center for Khmer Studies. Typically only about half of students pass exams, Peycam said. “In France, in general, only a few people pass. You don’t get good marks, but if you pass that’s good enough.”
But the killer exam is also a typically Asian phenomenon, suggested Frances Kemmerer, a US-born adviser to the Ministry of Education. “It’s typical in many Asian countries,” Kemmerer said. “There’s a tendency to mark in the middle of the range, and high marks are very few. Just passing the exam is quite prestigious.”
This reflects a conformist ethic in which “No one is perfect and you’re doing just fine if you’re right in the middle. It’s a different perception of the middle and of what excellence is.”
Some Cambodian teachers design exams to assert dominance over their students, suggested Luise Ahrens, a US citizen and adviser to the Royal University of Phnom Penh. “I’ve heard teachers say they will make questions that they couldn’t answer themselves, because they think if students do better than me, I’m a bad teacher.”
The contrast is strong with an individualistic, Western culture like the US, which has its own problems. In what is popularly known as “grade inflation,” middling students who might have gotten a B-minus or even a C 30 years ago are now accustomed to getting B-pluses or even As. At Harvard, the most prestigious university in the US, one-half of students were recently found to be receiving an A or A-minus.
No one argues that Cambodian students are inherently less studious than Westerners. Instead, grade inflation may be seen as inevitable in Western countries where self-esteem—individuals’ confidence in their own abilities—is a value.
But bunching everyone in the middle, just like bunching everyone near the top, can diminish the value of grading in the first place, said Ian Kidd of the Cambodia-Australia National Examinations Project, which aims to improve the 12th grade exams. It can make it difficult for outsiders, whether employers or other schools, to distinguish between students.
“Universities want to discriminate between the good and mediocre candidates. If everyone has Ds and Es, there’s fewer ways to do that,” Kidd said.
This year, for the first time, the 12th-grade exam and its subject grades will be used in public-school admissions, eliminating the need for separate university entrance exams. The administration and grading of entrance exams typically forced the delay of the start of the first year of university from Oct 1 to mid-December, Ahrens said.
But the skewed grade distribution has caused problems for admissions at the Royal University, Ahrens said. Administrators are considering formulating an admissions exam anyway, just “to sort out some of the lower [grade] levels,” she said.
The country’s flourishing private schools are also faced with a swamp of Ds, Es and Fs. Failing students cannot enter a four-year degree program and must take a two-year remedial program first, education officials say. But at Norton University, Cambodia’s largest private school, the grades of those students who do pass apparently matter little.
Instead, the school gives its own exam which determines which students can receive scholarships, said Te Laurent, vice rector at Norton. The in-house exam is more trustworthy than the 12th-grade exam because cheating is still believed to be widespread in the 12th grade test, Te Laurent said.
“[Cheating] is why we need to have another test to get quality students in the school,” Te Laurent said. “Otherwise we would just give [scholarships] to the high scorers in the ministry test.”
To international and many local employers, the exam grades mean little, said Sandra D’Amico, recruitment manager at the consulting firm SMS.
“Local firms, NGOs, international firms typically don’t ask for academic results. They think the education system is a farce anyway. They’d rather spend time internally developing people to make them the way they want to be.”
Suspicious of the educational system and widespread cheating, recruiters are more likely to use their own hiring tests, D’Amico said. Rather than academic results, they tend to rely on candidates’ job experience, their self-presentation and their ability to handle complex tasks and ideas.
Yet many education officials and advisers remain committed to ensuring that exam results have meaning. One way is to reduce cheating. Kidd said computerized scoring, initiated last year, has reduced the opportunities for cheating. But the perception remains that cheating is widespread.
Another way is to ensure that the grades themselves are meaningful. A letter grade can have a variety of meanings, education experts say. For tests scored on a so-called bell curve, an “A” would simply mean that a student scored better than a certain percentage of his fellows. In Western countries an A is often identified with a score in the 90th percentile or above.
A grade could also signal a level of competency in a subject. By carefully matching curriculum to questions, a so-called standardized test would show that a student could understand certain concepts or accomplish certain tasks, Kidd said. Kidd’s program, which ends next month, has helped to better match exam questions to curriculum, Ahrens said.
With the current exam, Kidd said, an “A” simply means that a student has gotten a certain number of questions correct. The grade is not connected to competence in the subject, performance relative to other students, or the number of slots available for freshmen at public or private universities.
Asked how the grades were determined, Ministry of Education chief of General Education Chroeng Limsry said it was simple: “The Ministry of Education defines a top score and puts it in the computer. When we sum up the total score, if someone reaches it they get an A.”
Kidd says he has lobbied education officials to begin grading the exams on a curve. Producing a truly standardized test would be “a difficult task,” he said, but grading on a curve would at least make it easier to distinguish between students.
If the grades are arbitrary, so are the failure rates, Kidd suggests. That appears to be reflected in the wild swings in the overall pass rates. Last year, two-thirds of all students passed (and 13 got As); this year, a majority of students failed.
It is as yet unclear, Kidd said, why the swing was so dramatic this year. Part of the reason could be that more students took the exam—about 18,000 this year—because there were more students in grade 12. Or it could mean the test questions, now oriented toward university admissions, are harder. Kidd said his project has helped write questions that require more concept-based thinking.
In any case, the inconsistency will make it difficult for universities and employers to compare candidates who graduate in different years, Kidd said. It’s also profoundly unfair, he said; students who last year might have sailed into university won’t have a chance at admission this year.
The mass failures only lead to needless suffering, Pok Than said. “A lot of people suffer, a lot of them cry. It’s not a good picture to me. I have people who come to me who are very sad.”
Eventually, all exams should be standardized at all levels, Pok Than said, though he acknowledged that talks are “just starting” at the ministry about standardization and many officials are still wedded to the French model.
The French idea of maximizing education of a tiny elite is going out of fashion even in France, Kidd said, and a more inclusive model has become the norm. “I think it’s better to educate a larger number of people to a different standard,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kidd’s organization has assisted education officials in ensuring that less-than-stellar students can have something to show for their academic efforts.
Until this year, failing 12th graders received no record that they had even completed 12 years of schooling, while passing students received simply an A, B or C grade.
Students who failed this year’s exam overall but passed at least one subject will get a “certificate of achievement” showing their grades in the subjects they passed. New grades—D and E—have been introduced, and passing students will be given a percentile rank as well as an overall grade. The changes will be useful tools for employers or schools, Kidd said.
Making tests harder won’t make students smarter, Pok Than said. Achieving true excellence will require improving opportunities in education and tying the exams more closely to the curriculum. “If it is the test that is too hard, and few students pass, it’s our failure, a failure of the education system. The goal of education is for students to learn so they can pass the exam.”
(Additional reporting by Yun Samean)
