Reported discrepancies in O-Level English oral not technical in nature or result of malicious act: MOE
Schools are working with candidates who may have experienced significant distress to apply for special consideration, says Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary.
File photo of secondary school students in their mixed form class at Jurong West Secondary School. (Photo: CNA/Raydza Rahman)
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SINGAPORE: The discrepancies reported in the recent GCE O-Level English oral examinations were not technical in nature nor the result of a deliberate or malicious act, Senior Minister of State for Education Janil Puthucheary said on Wednesday (Aug 5).
The issue arose after some candidates who sat for the exam on Jul 15 said the text prompt they saw on screen differed from what the oral examiner later read out to them.
This sparked complaints on social media, prompting the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB) to investigate. SEAB said at the time that there was no discrepancy, as the same question had been shown to both candidates and examiners.
Responding to parliamentary questions on the discrepancies reported after the exam on Jul 15, Dr Puthucheary said some candidates may have experienced significant distress from the circumstances, which may have affected their ability to provide a suitable response.
Schools are working with these candidates to apply for special consideration, a process that reviews final subject grades for candidates whose performance was adversely affected by circumstances beyond their control.
“This is to ensure fair assessment. Each application will be evaluated on its merit,” said Dr Puthucheary.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) found no discernible pattern in the incidents: the 432 candidates who reported discrepancies came from 200 different oral examiner teams, with no particular order among the affected candidates, he said.
WHAT HAPPENED
For the oral exam, candidates first sit at a silent preparation station, viewing exam instructions, a text prompt and a video on a computer screen. After 10 minutes, they are then called to see the oral examiner, who reads out the same text prompt to start the presentation, with a second examiner also present.
Candidates have two minutes to deliver a planned response, followed by a discussion with the examiners on a topic based on the video clip.
“To be clear, the discrepancies reported were not about what the oral examiners asked. Only that the recollection of the text prompt at the preparation station was different from what the oral examiner read out,” Dr Puthucheary said.
All stations at the examination centres access the same approved, secure, encrypted material from the system, he added.
For this exam, the video showed street barbers at work, with the prompt: "Who do you think would go to a place like this for a haircut? Why do you say so?"
The reported discrepancies varied significantly, with different phrases recalled by different students, including some who took the exam at the same centre with the same examination team, Dr Puthucheary said.
Some candidates reported reading “Would you go …”, “Would you be interested …”, “Would you want …” or other variations, he added.
In its investigations, SEAB verified the exam material through system-level checks, logging into candidates' accounts to confirm the prompt and video they accessed.
It also reviewed digital logs of the material's authoring and delivery, as well as logs of what appeared on candidates' screens during preparation.
Investigations found that oral examiners and candidates accessed the same material at every centre, with no evidence of a system malfunction and no discrepancy between what was shown to candidates and examiners, Dr Puthucheary said.
All candidates’ and examiners’ accounts accessed only one source, and no cybersecurity incidents were detected.
The mean score for the Jul 15 oral exam was comparable to that of the other four sessions this year, said Dr Puthucheary. The mean score of the 432 candidates who reported discrepancies was also comparable to that of other candidates who sat the exam that day, he added.
“Therefore, as a group, the candidates who reported discrepancies fared as well as other candidates who did not report discrepancies,” he said.
“Putting together the technical details, the distribution pattern of the incidents across the stations, schools and time, as well as the variety of phrases reported by the students, SEAB has concluded that the cause for these incidents was not technical in nature nor the result of a deliberate or malicious act.”
MEMBERS PRESS FOR ANSWERS
Asked if MOE would consider user-testing questions to avoid similar incidents, Dr Puthucheary said SEAB would look at how to reduce the risk of prompts being misread and guide students on preparing better.
Workers' Party MP Jamus Lim (WP-Sengkang) asked if SEAB was suggesting the Jul 15 incident was a case of "collective hallucination", and whether the investigation had privileged computer forensic evidence over testimonies from a significant number of human witnesses.
Dr Puthucheary reiterated that students had recalled a significant variety of different phrases, not the same phrase.
"We're looking at both the testimony, as well as the technical assessment. And the fact that the testimonies covered a wide variation in the phrases in itself is a very significant data point.
"So I would ask him to perhaps not put words in my mouth about collective hallucinations, nor imply a privileging of one set of data over the other," he added.
MP Kenneth Tiong (WP-Aljunied) described the incident as "highly anomalous" and asked if SEAB had also examined the candidates' physical planning sheets.
He also asked if MOE would allow an organisation outside of SEAB to conduct an external investigation.
Dr Puthucheary said it was difficult to correlate the planning sheets with specific reports, as many did not have candidates' names written on them. But in some cases, information from the sheets indicated that the student had misread the prompt, he added.
In other cases, students misread the prompt, began planning their response, then corrected themselves, he said, noting that one student had crossed out what they originally thought was the prompt and written down the correct one.
The senior minister of state confirmed that GovTech was asked to audit the technical platforms and the process, and it came to the same conclusion as SEAB.
MP David Hoe (PAP-Jurong East-Bukit Batok) asked what examiners did after students reported being asked a different question from the one shown at their terminal.
Dr Puthucheary said examiners are trained in "positive marking" and are not looking for absolute compliance with a template answer. Instead, they assess students' oral skills, including vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and tense, and how they present and organise their ideas, he added.
This is one reason why the marks of affected candidates are comparable to other students', he said.
"Sometimes, they had prepared incorrectly, but nevertheless were able to speak well, either on the initial subject that they thought they were presenting on, or when corrected, on the prompt that they heard from the examiner," said Dr Puthucheary.
