JCs no longer revealing to students how their cohorts fare in A levels

Decision meant to back move to reduce over-emphasis on grades and focus on holistic development

- Elisha Tushara

From 2025, junior colleges (JCs) will no longer reveal to students how their cohorts fared in the A-level examination.

This joint decision by the principals of all 17 JCs and Millennia Institute offering the A levels is meant to support the education system's move to reduce over-emphasis on grades, and focus on students' holistic development, said Mr Aaron Loh, principal of Raffles Institution, in an e-mail reply in response to queries.

This means that students who collected their A-level exam results on Feb 21 were not shown any grades-related data during their school briefings, such as the percentage of distinctions by subject or the number of students with at least three H2 distinctions.

In previous years, schools would share how the cohort performed across different subjects, as well as the number of top scorers, or put up such information on their websites.

This move comes after the International Baccalaureate (IB) stopped releasing data from May 2023 on the number of IB students with perfect scores of 45.

The Switzerland-based IB organisation had said in 2024 that this was to discourage the use of assessment results for comparisons among students, schools or communities.