Speaking at an event in Polonnaruwa recently, President Maithripala Sirisena said that the Government has decided to do away with the Grade five Scholarship Examination (GFSE) in the future. He said that he had proposed that the Ministry of Education scraps the scholarship exam. “The scholarship examination has not done any good to the children. Children have been mistreated by their parents for failing the exam. What is required in society is not a race to enter the best Government school in the country but to improve the resources in all schools,” the President said.
The GFSE has been a point of public contention for the past few years. Stories abound, where unwilling children were pushed into the ‘rat race’ of winning the scholarship and where competition had overpowered people’s humaneness and had brought up their most evil side. Today, it has become an unbearable psychological burden to growing children, as well as the parents.
The scholarship examination was introduced in 1948 by the then Minister of Education Dr. C.W.W. Kannangara. It was then named Central Colleges Scholarship Examination and provided an opportunity for talented students from village schools to study in Central Colleges where more facilities were available. The primary objective of the Grade Five Scholarship Examination was to provide an opportunity for students who excelled in the examination to get admitted to a better school in the area or in Colombo. It offered bursaries to talented but economically disadvantaged students throughout their school life. Today these objectives of the examination have been turned upside down.
The Sunday Observer inquired about the Ministry of Education’s position regarding the President’s statement on scrapping the scholarship examination. Media Secretary to the Minister of Education, Kalpa Gayan Gunaratne said that the discussion on scrapping the scholarship exams has been going on for a while but still they have not come to a decision whether to abolish it or to make it optional. “The Education Ministry has appointed a committee of educationists and currently they are holding discussions. The final decision will be made soon,” he said.
The General Secretary of the Ceylon Teachers’ Union (CTU) Joseph Stalin said that President Maithripala Sirisena’s decision to do away the Grade Five Scholarship Exam is unfair and that it will prevent children of poor families from entering popular schools.
The decision will allow only the elite to study at popular schools as there is much inequality among government schools.
A student should be allowed to enter better schools according to his or her performance, he said.
“There are 10,162 schools in the country, and approximately 350 national schools. Of those 350, only 36 schools are considered popular. Many students can be enrolled to Grade Six on the Grade Five Scholarship Exam results. A solution to this would be to allow only students who have a low socioe-conomic status to face the exam in the future. Even the National Education Commission (NEC) recommended this solution, and the Government should implement it, but without implementing it, the Government should not block the poor students’ way to academic success,” said Stalin.
Bimsara Nadesan, a parent from Gampaha is totally against scrapping the scholarship exam. “My elder son gained admission to Royal College, Colombo from Nalanda Madya Vidayalaya, Minuwangoda passing the scholarship exam. My second son too is even more talented and now he is in Grade three. I was hoping to admit him to Royal College in the future. Now, I am so worried after the President said that the scholarship exams will be done away with. The Government is talking about ‘Nearest school is the best school’ project but it has not been implemented and in the meantime how can the Government scrap the scholarship exams?” he asked.
According to him, the education in rural schools is much better when compared with popular city schools but they lack basic facilities, sports and extra-curricular activities. This is why some parents resort to corrupt practices to admit children to schools with good facilities. Therefore, the rural and poor students should be given a chance to go to a good school with good facilities through the Grade Five scholarship exam. If this is scrapped then the quota in popular schools for the children of politicians, doctors, lawyers and similar professional should be done away with too.
However, educationists and psychologists said that the Scholarship Examination has now become a great threat to the holistic development of children. If the child suppresses the desire to play and engage in creative activities, it is highly likely for him to disengage himself with those activities when grown up.
A Professor in Big Data Analytics who wished to remain anonymous said, that the Scholarship Examination puts an unbearable burden on children and destroys the childhood of the majority of the Sri Lankan students. That though the general mark to obtain a distinction in any examination is 75 even if a student scores 75 for the two question papers in the scholarship examination, he or she cannot pass that examination and qualify for the scholarship.
It is identified as one of the most difficult exams in the country that require intelligence and knowledge of a level beyond that of a 10-year-old child, leading to glean knowledge, often by useless cramming of facts which does not help develop their creativity, intelligence or skills at a crucial stage of brain development.
He said that most of the child’s time is spent in a classroom in school as well as at tuition classes. “The child is not let to experiment and experience the environment and the outer world. Playing, which is an inherent trait of children, becomes taboo. The Grade Five Scholarship examination has deprived the child of deriving the benefits of physical activities too making children psychologically, socially and physically unbalanced when they grow up. This in turn reflects badly on the society that it is difficult to find citizens with sound emotional and social intelligence,” he said.
Research on the Grade Five scholarship exam has revealed that it is much less effective than it is believed to be.
“The exam fares poorly in meeting its two main objectives,” said Ashani Abayasekara, Research Officer at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS), who had conducted research on assessing the effectiveness and the relevance of the scholarship exam. She highlighted that Sri Lanka should improve the quality of schools and teachers across the island, before moving on to abolish the exam. In the meantime, the exam should be restructured and made optional, she said.
Her research shows that the percentage of students admitted to Grade six in national schools, based on the scholarship exam results, is only 20 percent. Startlingly, even the movements that do take place mostly happen from privileged schools to highly-privileged schools, as opposed to under-privileged schools to privileged schools.
Only four percent of the students who sit for the exam are eligible for the bursary payment. The payment itself is as low as Rs. 500 per month.
The importance of the scholarship exam is, therefore, to provide opportunities to rural disadvantaged students to enter good schools for secondary education. The fact that only around 20 percent of students do get a chance to enter such schools based on the scholarship exam is a pity. “Mechanisms need to be first put in place to ensure that children, especially those from rural, disadvantaged backgrounds who stand to benefit from the exam, are not left high and dry,” she said.
According to her two short term solutions are available. One is a large increase in places in good schools for scholarship exam high scorers and the other is to make the exam voluntary in all schools. Such a policy measure, however, needs to be accompanied by mechanism to ensure that students from rural backgrounds and underprivileged schools sit for the exam, so that the exam’s intended purpose of providing better educational opportunities to such students is preserved, she added.