Jarod Yong

Looking for reading materials or comics by students for students? Proudly presenting #WeAreTJ, a website celebrating the English language creations of my students at SMK Tabuan Jaya! Visit: WeAreTJ.com You'll find plenty of interesting essays, poems, & comics! Support my students by reading & commenting on their work! We also have a nice home on the internet for the next 5 years thanks to sponsorships from Dr Selvanayagi, Chieng S. Li, Suit Lin, Nisa Shan, Jesselyn Tiong, Rachel Donald, King Ting Chai, & Charles Lee!

I bet you've seen this screen-captured table. I'm in a lot of education social media groups & every year around SPM season, this SPM baseline table will be reposted without fail in exactly the same way: some dude expressing shock at the low grades required for passing certain SPM subjects while lamenting the horrible state of our national education system. I enjoy intellectual discussions, but, if some random table is the basis for one's thesis, I roll my eyes & scroll away. However, I keep seeing this post repeating itself again & again & worse still I get tagged in some of them again & again until my eyes just can't roll any further. It's time to explain what a baseline is to those who are not teachers. What Is Baseline Data? Every school does this kind of data analysis, which is why those who cry wolf are usually not teachers. Why? A baseline is used to estimate the possible grades of our exam-taking cohort based on past SPM results. How? Base