The Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is a national examination in Singapore administered by the Ministry of Education and taken by all students near the end of their sixth year in primary school, before they move on to secondary school. This examination tests students' proficiency in the English language, their respective mother tongue languages (typically Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and some other South Asian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu), mathematics and science. Students have around two hours to complete each subject paper, except for certain components of language subjects. Students answer multiple choice questions by shading their responses on a standardised optical answer sheet (OAS) that uses optical mark recognition to detect answers.
The format of the PSLE and the presence of it in the Singapore education system gives the PSLE a part in national culture. PSLE material has also been exported to other countries. Some schools abroad have their students taken the international version of the exam, the iPSLE, in August to help them benchmark themselves vis-a-vis the performance of other foreign schools.
Read more about Primary School Leaving Examination: Examination Subjects and Procedure, Language Examination and Qualification, Scoring and Post-examination Procedure, Other Methods of Admission To Secondary Schools
Famous quotes containing the words primary school, primary, school, leaving and/or examination:
“Parental attitudes have greater correlation with pupil achievement than material home circumstances or variations in school and classroom organization, instructional materials, and particular teaching practices.”
—Children and Their Primary Schools, vol. 1, ch. 3, Central Advisory Council for Education, London (1967)
“The primary imperative for women who intend to assume a meaningful and decisive role in today’s social change is to begin to perceive themselves as having an identity and personal integrity that has as strong a claim for being preserved intact as that of any other individual or group.”
—Margaret Adams (b. 1916)
“The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being, as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)