Q&A: Analyzing Kwong Ming Ying Loi's Exam

Q: Was the exam difficult?

A: Overall, the emphasis is on reading comprehension. For all grade levels, there are at least 2 if not more pieces of reading comprehension. For students that struggle, they will definitely do poorly. There will be a great portion of students that give up reading the comprehension because of limited vocabulary, and they too, will do poorly. Even for P1 students, they face 2 pieces of reading comprehension. It is their first time doing exams, and they will find certain sections of the paper challenging, unless they can read and understand what they are reading, or else, they will not know what to write for the answers.

Q: Was a lot of emphasis placed on Reading Comprehension?

A: Yes. Reading comprehension is a test to a student’s knowledge in English vocabulary and understanding of sentence structure. It is not something you can just memorize from your textbook, that’s why many students will find it challenging. Then to have two, three, or more reading comprehension in one exam will effectively slide down the marks in this exam.

In general, Kwong Ming Ying Loi is a good school, and the homework and exam is not easy. It does require students to think and go one step further. Think of it as continual training for continual development. If students can handle it, they can do very well in the years to come. HOwever, for students that are struggling or have poor attention span, they really do have to work extra hard to get a reasonable mark.

Q: Was there specific parts of an exam that are especially tricky and difficult?

A: In my personal opinion, Preposition for “fill in the blanks” for P3 is very hard. The prepositions to fill are not common/typical prepositions they usually see or learn from their books. Unless students actually read a lot of books on their home and have near perfect grammar skills, it is rare they can get more than 2 correct. Out of 10 marks, students will most likely lose more than 6 marks just from these 5 questions. Overall, the difficulty of the exam this term is present; P2 and P6 exam papers are considered challenging and a little tricky by many parents and no students scored over 90% in P4.

Q: Is there any ways my child can do better in the next exam?

A: Practice makes perfect. Strategic practice and exposure to more reading comprehension exercise. That doesn’t mean just giving them a bunch of reading comprehension exercise and telling them to do it without giving them advice on what they should look for, how they should interpret the composition, and how to scan and find answers in limited time. We core in on this specific area, and within the 60 minutes class, we add in writing to the class in order to improve their writing as well. In a restricted amount of time, we want to train students to write sentences that are understandable with minimal grammar errors. We train them to write proper sentences and from there, write a good piece of composition.