[2] On 28 September 2018, Education Minister Ong Ye Kung reiterated his stance on keeping the PSLE while announcing that the ministry will remove several mid-year and year-end exams across the board from primary one up to secondary four with the aim of reducing assessments based on exam results and to encourage students to be an all rounder.
Promotion was to Form 2 in the secondary school instead of the previous Standard Six starting from January 1955, during the early days of self-government.
The remaining 1.7% did not qualify for the three streams and were offered choices to retake the examination or to move on to specialised vocational schools.
[7] The 2005 mathematics paper for EM1 and EM2 (equivalent to today’s standard stream) students was flawed due to a question having no definite method of working the answer out.
[8] In 2019, public debate arose concerning the practice of withholding PSLE result slips from students for failing to pay school fees.
This ensued after news claiming that a student was withheld her PSLE result slip, due to being unable to pay school fees, circulated widely on social media.
Students will also sit for Advanced Placement (AP) and Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) examinations in the senior years for benchmarks for admission into foreign universities.