Majority fails O/L examination; education Minister&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#039;s daughter included: LeN

Sri Lanka Education Forum > Blog > General

Posted on June 19, 2007 / 8 Comments

(LeN-2007 June 18, 7.50 pm) The Ordinary Level examination is one of the crucial examinations in the country which decides the future education of the children but it is sad to note that 52.7% of the applicants who sat for the exam have failed it.

According to statistics issued by the Examinations commissioner General Anura Edirisinghe 21,813 students have not passed a single language.

But the latest information is that Education Minister’s daughter has also failed the examination. She is being educated in one of the top most schools in Colombo 04.

Statistics issued by the examinations department say 57.3% of the students have failed the Maths exam.

http://www.lankaenews.com/English/news.php?id=4290Â

9 Comments

Lakmal
June 19, 2007, 9:50 am
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Exams should never be easy. Otherwise all the people will get higher marks & the value of the exam will goes down. But the sad thing is the percentage of failure. This clearly indicates the dilapidation of Sri Lankan education system. The government should pay the attention to this problem because, this is a red alert about future in Sri Lanka.
ahm
June 19, 2007, 10:22 am
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Actually i’m very very dissapointed with these figures. i did my OLs only 2 years ago, and i used to play the fool a lot in school. but with just a couple of weeks of study i manages to get 7A’s just like a walk over the park. in my opinion the standards of the local OLs are VERY low. it would be insane to look now while i’m doing AL’s to see it and say “pfft.. OL’s are easy”.. but this IS true. this is the opinion of many a teachers. the standard of education is going very low, everything is getting simplified. i’ve also realised that subjects like maths and science are even more simplified. and yet people cant even get a simple pass. a simple pass is like what 30 to 40 marks? and if any of you have seen an local OL english paper you’d get fits. basic stuff like joining the lines between stuff like “driver – car” and “knife – butcher”. if 16 year olds cant even get the basics right where is the bloody future of the country. unable to increase the standard of education of the students the authorities just standardise the papers every year.
sri lankans are known for their education, their maths and their knowlege. fo to the west, and you’d find some senanayake or samaranayake or some wijesinghe eventually lecturing you at a top notch university. or just go to some overly populated asian area in a europian country, you’d find the sri lankan guys giving tution for subjects like maths and physics to the locals there.. and we sri lankans have gained immense respect for this. and if you’d mention about these OL fail figures to them, they’d only laugh at us thinking that we are trying to make a joke.

truely, before this thing actually starts to become a joke some thing HAS to be done. this is insane!
Truth
June 19, 2007, 10:45 am
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Nearly 53% of the applicants failing G C E (O/L) is not a good news, given the fact that (as ahm correctly points out) the standards are so low. I fail to understand how can one fail such a simple exam, even if one wants to. I could have passed it if I have sit the same even in Grade 6 or 7. Yes, I would not have got any distinctions, but even the knowledge of a 6th or 7th grader is enough to pass it. But every year there are so many failures including people like the JVP leader Mr. Wimal Weerwansa (who could not pass O/L Maths in 1989)and this year the daughter of the education minister, who had studied at one of the top girls schools. Are there people fools? Or simply they did not care? These are questions the educationalists of this country have to answer.

We should also not forget that unlike the students from Colombo schools, those from remote areas rarely find good teachers. Sometimes they do not have Maths or Science teachers for the entire year. Obviously such conditions will make students fail.

How many students who sit for the exam are actually fit to sit it? I mean do we know all applicants sit for O/L are mentally sound to sit it? Perhaps not. Since this is the first critical test they take in entire student life many who may not be even fit to sit might take it.
Shifan
June 19, 2007, 1:01 pm
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This shows how good our examination standards are…
even education minister can’t influence the results…
I feel proud about this…
JM
June 20, 2007, 8:49 am
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When you say they’ve failed the exam, does that mean they’ve failed all the subjects or just one or two? I find it hard to believe that 52% of the students would have failed all the units. Even I failed one subject but got Distinctions for eight others.
Coordinator
June 20, 2007, 9:44 am
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As I understand a pass at the GCE(O/L requires 6 passess that includes math and a language. I could not finds any official documents on that. Somebody please confirm.

“Truth” makes the important point that GCE(O/L) is the first critical exam that these kids face and whether the they are fit to sit for the exam. In a previous column in this forum we raised the similar question whether Grade 9 might be the critical point and there were several positive responses to that question.
Coordinator
June 20, 2007, 9:44 am
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As I understand a pass at the GCE(O/L requires 6 passess that include math and a language. I could not find any official documents on that. Somebody please confirm.

“Truth” makes the important point that GCE(O/L) is the first critical exam that these kids face and whether the they are fit to sit for that exam. In a previous column in this forum we raised the similar question whether Grade 9 might be the critical point and there were several positive responses to that question.
Ashan
February 2, 2008, 7:16 pm
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Hi Iam Ashan Musthakeem. My Native place is srilanka but iam studying in inia i want some information about some friends if mine.there names are rimzan,rashad,and rashida farwin who wrote o/l in 2007

thank you for your