Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1053035
13 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 18 NOVEMBER 2018 NEWS JAMES DEBONO CARELESS presentation, un- decipherable handwriting, and a lack of neatness have become recurrent problems among primary school pupils. A benchmark exam report on the performance of pri- mary schoolchildren has complained that kids are "scribbling, not writing", with examiners unhappy about the way students try to cross out mistakes in the most careless of ways. "It is a great pity that many students are scribbling not writing," examiners said, la- menting that students are not being equipped with basic writing skills. "It seems that these basic skills are being ne- glected at primary level and many students are scribbling not writing." The report calls on teachers to revise "certain practices" like fill-in-the-blanks exercis- es which are not helping stu- dents in learning how to write full sentences. Markers in the English exam were more nuanced, noticing that overall candidates seem to plan their writing tasks better than in previous years with more organised and de- tailed planning. However, they also noted the following areas of con- cern: spelling and punctua- tion errors, incoherent and fragmented writing, misuse of tenses, limited vocabulary, haphazard use of memorised proverbs and idiomatic ex- pressions, failure to follow in- structions and lack of knowl- edge of the basic elements in story writing. Girls outsmart boys in primary benchmark The report shows that girls fare better than boys in Eng- lish and Maltese while boys tend to perform better in Maths. Moreover, underachieving boys tend to get significantly lower marks than undera- chieving girls in all three sub- jects. The trend for girls to do better in most subjects ex- cept mathematics tallies with trends observed in later ex- aminations like SEC. A report on this year's benchmark exam shows that in both Maltese and English, the top 25% of girls scored 79 or higher whilst the top 25% of boys scored 76 or higher. But in mathematics the top 25% of girls scored 85 or higher and boys scored 87 or higher. But boys were the most like- ly to get lower marks in all three subjects. In Maltese, the bottom 25% of girls scored 59 or lower whilst the bottom 25% of boys scored 52 or lower. In English, the bottom 25% of girls scored 62 or lower whereas the bot- tom 25% of boys scored 57 or lower. In Mathematics, the bottom 25% of girls scored 57 or lower whereas the bot- tom 25% of boys scored 56 or lower. Overall the benchmark re- port shows students per- forming marginally better in English than in Maltese and Maths, with the median mark in English being one mark higher (70) than that in the other two subjects (69). A total of 3484 students in 86 schools participated in the main session of the 2018 end-of-primary benchmark. These included all 62 State primary schools, 20 Church schools and four independent schools. Writing skills in primary schools worsening, examiners complain