Miss Loi is a full-time private tutor in Singapore specializing in O-Level Maths. Her life's calling is to eradicate the terrifying LMBFH Syndrome off the face of this planet. For over 17 years she has been a savior to countless students ... 
Yesterday Miss Loi was at Popular Bookstore with a friend who was shopping for PSLE assessment books for her son who is currently in Primary Six.
Having stopped tutoring Primary School/PSLE Math for a long time, Miss Loi was curious to know their standards these days and so she picked up a few of these assessment books and started flipping through the pages - at the same time wondering with a smirk how many nanoseconds she would take to solve each question.
That hypothesis was quickly thrown out of the window when she saw stuffs like these:
(click to zoom-in and view the questions, and apologies for the somewhat blur images as Miss Loi stupidly forgot to use the ‘flower’ mode of her N73)
Wow. Mensuration problems usually taught in Secondary One/Two E-Maths. These should take Miss Loi more than a few seconds each *massages battered ego*
Yet more browsing brought her to this:
What the … ?! Isn’t this almost like the Lazy Bugger Algebra Question Miss Loi posted here on April’s Fool Day? You mean Miss Loi actually posted a PSLE question disguised as an E-Maths problem???! She even mentioned that it had many of her O-Level students stumped!
Thrusting this aside, she opened another PSLE assessment book and saw this:
Suspecting that she had seen something similar before, she quickly took out her O-Level 10-Year Series and sure enough … :
Desperate and confused, she was now frantically flipping the pages like a mad woman. Her friend had already begun to move slowly away from her. And the salesgirl at the counter was also frantically flipping the pages of the phone directory for IMH’s number.
In all these years, had Miss Loi really been teaching O-Level or PSLE Maths?! She got the shock of her academic life when she saw this:
This is an A-Level question from the Series (Methods of Differences) syllabus! Compare that to something similar take off a maths tutorial from a top Junior College in Singapore:
Notice that the JC tutorial question at least provided some hint/clue at the front while the PSLE one simply demands you, in no uncertain terms, to “Find the sum”!
Fast-forward to today.
To reassure herself that yesterday wasn’t some sick nightmare, she posed the last PSLE question to some of her A-Level students.
The result? One of them couldn’t solve it while another needed to use her super-duper graphical calculator to get the answer. Oh dear, Miss Loi’s ominous prophecy looks set to be fulfilled afterall.
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8 Comments
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Miss Loi, I am ashamed to let you know what passes for PSLE math test questions in the USA, though I’ll try to find a copy for your amusement and my embarrassment. They are probably equivalent in difficulty to the math questions that each Singaporean needs to answer in order to leave his or her mother’s birth canal.
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Lol thank goodness we don’t have BCLE (Birth Canal Leaving Examination) - yet!
Wonder what will happen if the baby fails!
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Oh my goodness!!!! Miss Loi, are THESE really PSLE questions? They learn Pi in primary school?
Somebody get me the digital couch, I need to sit down.
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Coming soon to a kindergarten near you:
English class: A for Apple, B for Boy, C for …
Maths class: α for Alpha, β for Beta, γ for Gamma … π for 22/7 …
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1/6+1/12+1/20+1/30
Primary Wiz kids would see the pattern
by numerator 6,(6+6=12),(12+8=20),(20+10=30), (30+12=42),(56),(72) Last term(9900)
But still unable to get a clue
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Aldwin,
On behalf of the Primary Wiz kids, Miss Loi would like to thank you for trying.
FYI, a peek at the solution for the question in the book revealed that Methods of Differences were indeed used to solve it, just that they didn’t name it as such!
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My sister is going to answer PSLE in 2008 in Myanmar. Her email is crystalsandi@gmail.com. I want you to sent some Maths paper to her email.
I hope you accept my request.
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Thanks for dropping by Jessica. Unfortunately only O-Level (and not PSLE) Maths papers available here.
P.S. Interesting that Myanmar also have their own version of PSLE!
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[…] Miss Loi runs Jφss Sticks. This visually-rich and popular blog includes PSLE 1 Higher Education 0. […]
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[…] what I wanted to quote already, but there’s this entry that she wrote sometime ago about PSLE Maths, which had confirm plus guarantee plus chop reaffirm my stand on, if possible, must avoid AT ALL […]