Starting from 2016, students in national schools (sekolah kebangsaan) are required to take six subjects.
The score is calculated based on a bell curve, thus the passing grade is reflected by the yearly performance.
Effective 2021, the UPSR exams were abolished and replaced with school-based assessments, seeing it suffer the same fate as the PMR examinations.
However, SJK students may opt to sit for the SK paper with permission from their schools.
Questions that are frequently asked in this exam are fractions, subtraction, multiplication, division, addition, area and volume, mass, perimeter, decimal points, average, data, digit numbers, percentage, money, time, date and duration.
The new format for Penulisan consists of three sections, namely A, B and C. The time allowed is one hour and fifteen minutes.
Occasionally, however, pictures might not be provided and to substitute that, candidates might be asked to write sentences about a graph, a mind map, multiple images, or a time table.
The questions in the Comprehension paper are grouped into two sections: A with 20 multiple choice questions dealing with Grammar, Vocabulary and Comprehension; and B with 5 questions, dealing with Social expressions, Comprehension, and HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) On 10 September 2014, the Examination Syndicate had made a statement stating that instead of the Science paper(018, 028, 038) being sat the next day, it would be postponed to 30 September.
The reason given for the postponement was due to the fact that the question paper was leaked on social media.
[3] Talk of abolishing the examination had begun in 2016 when the then-Education Minister, Mahdzir Khalid said that a study was being done to evaluate the future of UPSR.