My thoughts on the MUET results..

Well the big day has come and is almost gone and I've endured a roller-coaster of emotions.. Firstly, I'm super proud of my SMK Majakir school students who took the exam and broke all records, or at least records that matter to me. Bear in mind that I taught the best class and the ahem.. 'least best' class and from the two we scaled many new heights. My star student Joanne Gan managed to garner a Band 5 (we havent had one since 2007, be reminded that we are on the outskirts of the city so for a small town school, to me that's a great achievement) and the cherry on the sundae is the fact that she scored 45/45 (perfect!!!!) scores for the listening paper. Va-va-voom! Good job, Joanne! The other class I teach has 21 students and only one obtained a Band 1 (I measure my success by eradicating hardcore failures, footnote: this is my personal yardstick and I don't expect anyone else to follow in my footsteps). Even he scored 95, 5 marks shy of the minimum target I place on them, so I'm still proud that he tried his best.

However, there were a few people who did not hit the 140 target (B3), and one person in particular whom I truly feel for as she has tried many times and fallen short, this time a single mark (139) dividing between a pass (which translates to graduation vs. non-graduation) and a fail. Sighs.. I wish the fates had been kinder to her. Never mind, as I've mentioned in an earlier post, it's not how hard you fall, but how fast you get up. In addition, consider it one of those tricky learning curves life boomerangs at you and you just have to duck faster or catch it with more precision. Anyway, time to dust off and get back to the drawing board. Good luck for the next round!

My next blog is courtesy of a blogwalker who's emailed me his essay and I've edited it. He's allowed me to share it with you all so that you can see how a person's word order and sentence order can affect your scores even if you have relatively good grammar and vocabulary. Right, so for all out there gearing up for the next MUET exam, you need to work at it starting now. Even now can be considered 'too late' as learning a language (esp one as complicated as English) is NOT an overnight phenomenon. :P Stay tuned!