Reading Barney's blog made me feel better that at least something is done about 'A' levels SPA. He actually emailed the higher management to reflect his views on SPA and urged for a review to look into the current situation in SPA. I did not comment on the SPA thingy until today, after my first day of SPA course on skill B. SPA for Physics does seem like a good idea that just did not work out the way it intended to be. And I'm concerned since I will most likely be doing it next year, hopefully not alone.

SPA is a form of assessment that focus mostly on the process rather than product, which could lead to many controversial issues. Just today, we saw something obviously wrong with the table in a sample practical report but yet the trainer told us that because we are accessing skill B, we can't penalize that which comes under skill C, even though skill B specifically states that we are supposed to assess the table! Does this make sense? Some teachers in the course raised a valid and important point that was not really dealt with in the class.

Wouldn't we be sending the wrong message to the students if they get full credit for a pratical report that has obvious mistakes?

One fine day, pointy hair boss of education thought that writing is important but students don't learn how to write by writing composition because they never picked up the relevant skills in writing. So pointy hair boss decided to implement a skill-based assessment for composition in all the languages. A committee was formed and they came out with the following skill for writing composition. These are skills that reowned authors used to write their bestsellers like "Notes from an even smaller Island" and "Harry Potter".

Skill A: Planning - To plan the for writing an essay/novel/complain letter/straits times forum. The students have to take into consideration of who are the intended audience, what is the moral of the story, the twists and main characters involved and any humour involved blah blah.. They have to justify the style of writing that they would choose to write for that piece too.

Skiil B: Implementation - To write in a grammatical manner in present tense, past tense, present perfect tense. In speech, reported speech, a quote or how to truncate your quotes for straits times. To write with flair that includes at least 10 uncommon words that falls into categories like 1.) 15+ letter words, 2.) Words that include 5 different vowels. Use of metaphors and idioms would score more marks. Students are also expected to demonstrate that they would edit and review their own statements as they write by cancelling ungrammatical sentences. They need to suggest a reason why they wrote the ungrammatical line in the first place to score.

Skill C: Content - To write with a rich content that includes as many twists as channel 8 drama serials and as many characters as the Chinese classic, Water Margin. It would be good to describe the setting that your writing is based upon in some details. For example, the colour, texture, height, width, thickness, density, flash point and wavefunction of the door of the bedroom in your story. The content must be relevant to the topic assigned too.

Skill D: Evaluating - To critic on your own piece of writing. To state and explain some of the problems in the writing and the difficulties faced and suggest possible ways to overcome those dreadful writer's block. Be able to discuss the limitations of the style of writing chosen for the genre and suggest improvement that could improve on the style or how you could synthesize 2 distinct writing styles to satisfy the aim of say writing a humourous complain letter.

So an sentence like "My grandmother, who's favourite song is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, learned the word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis after spelling hepaticocholangiocholecystenterostomies." would make little sense in skill C but would score for skill B. (see here for the meaning of those tongue twisting words)