So Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) data analyses have been super popular in Malaysia recently, partly popularized by the incredible Cambridge-trained economist and data scientist Thevesh ., who’s been sharing his very cool visualizations of SPM data on both X and also LinkedIn ever since SPM results were released on 27th May, 2024.

Curious about his work, I dropped a quick message, and Thevesh was kind enough to share with me a little bit about what he had done – and I found myself analysing a little SPM dataset from Lembaga Peperiksaan (Malaysia’s Examinations Board) that Thevesh was kind enough to send to me through Github, which I did with a mixture of Python ala Anaconda and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o in data analysis mode.

What it told me was what I now call “The 100% Strategy”.

If you want 10A’s for SPM guaranteed(?), you should take Apresiasi Tari (Dance Appreciation), Sinografi (Sinography), Tarian (Dance), Aural dan Teori (Aural and Theory), Produksi Seni Persembahan (Performance Arts Production), Reka Bentuk Industri (Industrial Design), Multimedia Kreatif (Creative Multimedia), Sejarah dan Pengurusan Seni (History and Management of the Arts), Lakonan (Acting), and Penulisan Skrip (Scriptwriting).

Why do I say that right there?

We will talk about correlation v. causation a little later (of course!), but if you look inside the SPM dataset for 2023, you will notice that for each of these ten subjects, the proportion of A grades is 100%.

What does this mean?

Every single candidate who took these subjects in 2023 received an A for the subjects, no questions asked.

Here is a handy visualisation to help you see what I mean, with the proportion of A’s for SPM 2023 sorted in descending order of proportion and number of candidates.

…And here is a small table containing the sorted data.

Yes, these are real subjects, and yes you can sign up for them as a private candidate on the Examinations Board website in case you want to relive your SPM years for some odd reason, or force your children to do so.

In other words, it is not irrational to choose to take these subjects in the hope of getting A’s for them.

But then you might well ask:

Why is this relevant at all?

It is relevant because whether we like it or not, we do live in a grade-conscious society.

More concretely, if you’re from Malaysia and you’ve been through a government school of any sort, you probably know that scholarship bodies and universities care about the number of A-pluses that you get in your exams and make university placement and scholarship offers on the basis of SPM grades, commonly the number of A’s that a student has.

It’s not that it’s illogical – but it’s certainly the case that at the highest levels of competition, this does result in a drive towards the top where people try to get the largest number of A’s and A-pluses that they possibly can, find anything in their power to get ahead of the competition.

As I reflected on this, I realized that it was easy to be blinded – yet, recognising that this was part of reality, it made me wonder:

If I were to go back in time and re-do SPM with the aim of getting a scholarship from a scholarship body that simply requires me to get a certain number of A’s, what should I do?

Certainly, many scholarship bodies require A+’s rather than just A’s – unfortunately, Lembaga Peperiksaan doesn’t really break down what kind of A it is that has been received right here but hey, an A is an A, and I figured that it was interesting to discover the answer to that question – and here it is, for your consideration:

If you want 10A’s and you’re making your judgment just based on historical data, take Apresiasi Tari, Sinografi, Tarian, Aural dan Teori, Produksi Seni Persembahan, Reka Bentuk Industri, Multimedia Kreatif, Sejarah dan Pengurusan Seni, Lakonan, and Penulisan Skrip.

Now, the reality is that in order to receive an SPM certificate, you still need to take certain basic subjects such as Malay, History, Math, English, and so on so forth, and so even if you were to try to game the system, you’d still find yourself in a position where if you don’t study at all, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you have 10 A’s and also maybe 5 G’s or something of that nature.

…But maybe you don’t care?

That is entirely your right!

Even so, before you start enrolling yourself in some of these rather… Unique subjects, it’s time to throw some cold water on that hype, as we consider…

What explains a 100% A grade rate?

Intuitively, a 100% A rate suggests that a subject must be ‘easy’ to get an A in, and therefore that taking the subject entails that you will do well – one reason you might be hovering your cursor over that registration button at the moment.

Even so, simply because it’s not irrational to choose to take Dance Appreciation (hey, it could be interesting!), not all that is rational is correct, and there are some things worth thinking about.

#1: Self-Selection.

In the SPM 2023, the subject with the smallest number of students was Reka Bentuk Kraf with 17 students.

The proportion of students in Reka Bentuk Kraf relative to the 372,656 students who took the compilsory Sejarah (History) in 2023, is approximately 0.0046%, which tells us that not many people elected to take Reka Bentuk Kraf relative to the total population size of SPM takers, to say the least.

This was true for all of the other subjects for which there was a 100% A rate, with Reka Bentuk Kraf only having 17 students, Sejarah dan Pengurusan Seni having 67 students, Produksi Seni Persembahan having 171 students, Multimedia Kreatif having 23 students, Aural dan Teori having 71 students, Penulisan Skrip having 100 students, Apresiasi Tari having 56 students, Lakonan having 44 students, Tarian having 56 students, Sinografi having 44 students, and Muzik Komputer having 76 students.

Please bear in mind, therefore, that the subjects identified are very niche subjects and they often require specialised equipment or training, and secondly, bear in mind that there are very, very few candidates for every single one of the subjects identified here.

Given that we have a maximum of only 171 candidates for any individual one of these subjects, we are forced to consider why that is the case, and it leads us away from the “they got A’s for this subject because it is easy” interpretation – indeed, if you are one of the few students who took these subjects, there’s a good chance that you were interested in the subject and invested enough to receive training, practice, and coaching to participate.

In other words, one possible interpretation is that if you were one of the rare people who took these subjects, chances are that you had been quite interested in the subject itself, hence why you’d make a special accommodation, and therefore why you might be likely to get an A for the subject.

In other words? Correlation does not equal causation.

Simply because 100% of the candidates for all the subjects I identified got A’s for each of the subjects I identified, there’s no guarantee that taking these subjects will definitely grant you an A, and there is no guarantee that you will get an A in SPM 2024 or 2025 simply on the basis of this data because the candidates may have gotten A’s on the basis of their interest, ability, and disposition – NOT because the subject is easy.

If you just go right ahead and take all of these different subjects but you have no interest in them, that could still mean that you just don’t end up doing well for it because unlike the rest of the people who took it, you just didn’t have the interest or nature to do well.

That said, let’s look at the next interpretation.

#2: Coursework basis.

None of these subjects are listed anywhere in the SPM timetable.

Now before people out there start screaming about how there must be some scamming and cheating going on, know that they are all coursework subjects.

What that means is that essentially in order to receive a grade, you submit a portfolio and coursework over to the examinations board, and then from there you receive a grade.

Of course, if the percentage of A’s for the coursework is to the point that every single grade is an A, then that might raise some questions about artificially inflated standards, but that’s not something that I’m about to comment upon too extensively, partly because that can be accounted for by the self-selection I talked about a little bit earlier on, namely that only people who are interested in these disciplines might be fascinated enough to undertake the long hours of research for the purpose of performing well in these exams.

Still, is there something afoot? That’s a separate investigation to be made, and I leave it out there to those of you who are interested enough.

What I will say is, coursework isn’t something to shake a finger at right there, it does require commitment and skill to be able to create a coursework project, and even more so if it’s something that you’re not really a fan of.

Is it worthwhile to investigate whether there’s a scandal such that every single person who takes the subjects I mentioned will receive an A regardless of how poorly they do?

I suppose that’s up to you to decide!

Now, what do we make of this?

The data reveals to us that there are ten SPM subjects in which the A rate was 100%, and I pointed out that there were several possible explanations to this that elude the easy intuition that if you want 10A’s, you can go ahead and register for every single one.

Of course, someone might very well read this and decide to register for all of those subjects at the same time anyway in the name of using this data to make an informed decision.

To them, I wish all the best – I am not here to judge, only to present nuance, to play Devil’s advocate, and therefore to ask:

If it were really possible to get 10A’s in SPM or any other form of consequential public examination just by following this advice alone, should you do it?

I suppose some people might, in the push for scholarships, university admissions, and any number of other things in which the question of exam results are important – and frankly, it is hard to blame them if they don’t particularly care what subjects they take, the people evaluating them don’t care either, and their only goal is just to get to a better place in life.

To each their own utility function, of course – but if nothing else, perhaps what this may tell us is this.

Whether we are a scholarship body looking for the best students, a selective employer seeking after the best talent or otherwise…

Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking at people just based on the number of A’s that they have. Rather, perhaps we need to look more closely and beyond the superficial in order to get a real sense of what people actually are about – their character, their motivation, and their purpose, before we make consequential decisions like whom to hire, whom to choose for a selective university program, and whom we choose to represent us.

This is, after all, something we aren’t insulated from this even if we are looking at more ‘difficult’ exams, however difficulty is operationalised. (Failure rate? Proportion of grades below C? Dropout rates?)

Although exam results measure something and they are certainly important particularly with respect to certain professional qualifications and certifications, they aren’t the only thing that we should consider, and evaluating a person requires a deeper insight that simply a gaze upon the surface, at the report cards, or a blind deference to what the late Daniel Kahneman would have called System 1 thinking – rapid, intuitive, but in the absence of verification in the face of a reality to which intuition does not apply, potentially hazardous and externally invalid.

Whatever the case though…

Enough rambling!

You now know the 100% strategy, its ins and its outs. If signing up your child for SPM Dance Appreciation as a private candidate is something that you want to do right there, please let me know how that goes – Do leave me a message, leave me a comment, and I would love to hear your story.

On the other hand, if you just enjoyed this analysis and would like to hear my thoughts on education and exam performance, or watch the (many!) conversations that I am fortunate to have with some of Malaysia’s best thinkers, make sure to follow me on LinkedIn and YouTube for more in the days to come!

Alright, and that’s it, thanks for reading, and I will look forward to seeing you in the next one!

Yours,

Victor.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

The Future of Writing: How Automated Speech Recognition Will Transform Your Writing

In the modern world, creating documents is a fundamental part of almost every profession, and they are key to a variety of tasks: communicating ideas, formalizing agreements, sharing information, reporting progress, instructing, or preserving records. Whether you’re working in business, education, healthcare, law, or creative fields, the need to produce written content is pretty much everywhere — whether you’re creating a PowerPoint deck, writing a report, or crafting a script either for a YouTube video or for an episode of a TV show, you’ll definitely have to sit down and begin writing to bring out your ideas. But as you may know, writing isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be tedious and painstaking, imposing challenges upon your body that are difficult to deal with, such as carpal tunnel syndrome and the stresses of sitting down for long periods of time. Thankfully, it’s a challenge that has a solution: Automated Speech Recognition (ASR). ASR is a technology that historically hasn’t been the best at reporting down what people say, but it has remarkably improved although the best of it is something that still evades the modern and widely available voice assistants on iPhones and Android phones. However, nowadays apps like Wispr Flow and also MacWhisper work effectively and allow dramatically more accurate and longer transcriptions that serve niches such as creating subtitles, as can the ChatGPT app on your phone along the way, which you can download on iOS or Android, Which allows you to use your voice to interact with your devices in ways that have historically not been possible and that also transform the way that we use our technology and therefore interact with the world. Let’s dive into why. While some of you already know that I started using Wispr Flow recently, I’ve actually been using a range of different transcription tools as part of the suite of different apps that make life simple and […]

Wispr Flow: The Future of Voice-Activated AI Transcription

In the past couple of decades of human history, I can remember the seminal inventions that shaped our human existence so profoundly that somehow or another, whether we realized it or not, our lives had changed. Of these inventions, the most immediate that I can point to is Google, the search engine that made it so we could see the entire world. Beyond that, I’d say Facebook, the social media app that connected the world in a strange technological network.  The next one of these and probably freshest in people’s memories is ChatGPT, the tool that showed us the power and usefulness of generative AI, highlighting for us both the revolution of this new technology and also heightening our fears that one day robots would take over all of us. Well, I firmly believe that the next one is here, and its name is Wispr Flow. Download it here!  But what exactly is Wispr, and why are you asking me to download this?  Well, I’m glad you asked. What is Wispr? Wispr is an AI transcription software, but it is not just any transcription software. It’s a transcription software that activates at the touch of a button.  You can use it in any text field and begin transcribing what you are saying by nothing more than a touch of a button and then speaking into your microphone, which ends up creating transcriptions like this, and even intelligently paragraph what you are saying while at the same time minimizing redundancy by fixing mistakes for you on the fly, based on your writing style, yielding transcriptions like this. What does it cost? The software itself is free to use for up to 2,000 words in the course of a single week if you choose to use the Flow Basic plan.  On the other hand, if you use Flow Pro, which most of you probably will. […]

Meeting Tun Dr Mahathir

Today I had a conversation with Tun Dr Mahathir.  This is the kind of conversation that a person doesn’t normally have. I don’t expect that many people will have it or many people would have had it. Given everything that has happened so far, it’s far from clear that many other people will be able to have it, and so I know that it is a rare and wonderful privilege.  I remember clearly all the things that happened. I showed up in a GrabCar to the Perdana Leadership Foundation, ten minutes before our 9:30 appointment.  Walking in to the picturesque building, there I saw our very first national car in blue – the Saga, brought forth from one of Tun Mahathir’s pet projects.  As I looked around, I saw that the place was grand – the paintings of prime ministers depicting Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Razak, Tun Hussein Onn, Tun Mahathir, and Tun Abdullah – the gallery – the chandeliers and carpeted floors broken only by gorgeous wooden balustrades that led a curved staircase up into an open space. I stood there spellbound – I had not expected a place of such beauty.  As I looked around, I realized that I had arrived early and it was not time for my appointment yet. But before long, my contact Adam called – and so with bated breath, I walked into the room where I would meet Tun Dr. Mahathir.  In the morning, I had watched Khairy Jamaluddin and Shahril Hamdan’s interview of Tun Mahathir on 2X, paying attention to the questions that he had asked and all of the things along the way, which was also interesting because incidentally I’d also met both of them just the other day at a book launch featuring Kishore Mahbubani – How strange fate is and how the world seems to connect everybody in short order.  […]

The Night Before I Met Mahathir

It is the night before I meet Dr. Mahathir. For those of you who didn’t know about this, welcome to yet another strange and interesting episode of my life: Tomorrow, I will be interviewing Tun Dr. Mahathir, the 4th and 7th Prime Minister of Malaysia, for my podcast, Pathways To Excellence. I sit here with two books in front of me, the first, The Malay Dilemma, and the next, A Doctor in the House, and I contemplate both and the way they have unquestionably shaped my life. Dr. Mahathir was my Prime Minister when I was just born. From young, I always thought that every country had a Prime Minister; indeed, it is from him that I learned the very concept of Prime Minister itself. For years and years, this had gone on, and I went from thinking that he was the only one who would ever occupy that position, to learning that other countries had ‘presidents’ and ‘kings’, later downgrading the man’s significance as I thought of the ‘world’ and how wide it was, moving first from thinking that Malaysia was everything to thinking that it was tiny, insignificant, hating it, coming back, making it home, and then realising that it was what we made of it. It is fascinating how small the mind of a child is – yet, as I would later realize, how small the mind of an adult is when they fail to contemplate the significance of things that are nearby. I never really thought too extensively what it would mean to actually encounter this person one day. Then one day, many years after my father had died and was buried in the Sungai Petani Christian Cemetery, I found a book. My mum said that she wanted to throw it away, but somehow she didn’t, and there I saw it in its ancient form, yellowed pages […]

Societally Valuable

Every morning I wake up, I ask myself: How do I be someone valuable to society, and how do I create things that are valuable to society? Ever since I was a child, I think that this question has been a part of me – the part that wants to create something that’s of my own in service of the world in which I live through imagination, thought, and the machinations of a mind that will not sit still.  Some may argue that choosing to make a difference is a matter of disposition. I don’t want to give to society. I want to live for myself! Why should I care about what other people think? I consider people entirely able to make such statements and accept that they exist don’t disagree with that – human beings are different and naturally abide in different worlds; bearing different personalities, we approach the world through myriads of different lenses built from different world views, cultural backgrounds, and educational experiences. In such a world, might someone not argue that becoming societally valuable is merely one of many pathways. Surely that is an overgeneralization?  Personally, I feel that that is not so, purely because society is a large and far-ranging concept. Rather than an abstract and faraway entity, it is something that is close and begins from those closest and dearest to us before it extends outwards into the world. Society is fundamentally made up of individuals – our friends, our family members, the people who make up the sum and total matrix of people whom we know and love, and those whom we have yet to know whether near and within our communities, or far away and outside of them. To bring value to these people and by extension to society is not so grandiose as ending climate change, eliminating inner city crime, or resolving […]

AUAM-NAMSA Corporate Pathways Networking Dinner – Some small reflections.

The journey has been pretty interesting in a whole bunch of different ways. Amongst other things, I’ve received a partnership with GerakBudaya, and also in conjunction with the American Universities Alumni Association of Malaysia and the National Assembly of Malaysian Students in the United States of America (NAMSA), we are organizing this event. Here’s the event PDF to showcase that this is quite real. Honestly, even the term Corporate Pathways is a bit of a misnomer. I don’t know how corporate this event is going to be, primarily because it’s mainly going to be focused upon experience sharing and how people thought about their lives in the course of GLC in relation to the education that they received while they were in the U.S. There is a whole backstory to this that goes back about a month or two months or so, but has led me to a place of networking, meeting different people, and establishing friendly chat after friendly chat, rather than transactional moment after transactional moment with a bunch of different people with whom I probably never imagined at the outset that I’d be on casual speaking terms with. Anyway, here are some of the people who will be on the panel. GLC Panel: Nick Khaw, Head of Research at Khazanah and alumnus of Harvard University. Aik Chong Phuah, previous CEO of Petronas Digital and alumnus of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Brendan Yap, Senior Executive at the Securities Commission and alumnus of NYU. Athirah Azmi, former Manager, Client Coverage at Maybank Investment Bank and alumna of the University of Chicago  Private Sector Panel: Audrey Ooi, co-founder of Colony Coworking Space and an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, also known as @fourfeetnine. Dato’ Vincent Choo, Founder, Urban Ground Group, Franchisee Subway; alumnus of Eastern Michigan University. Yen Ping Teh, APAC Product Partnerships at Google and an […]