5th August 2007

No more differentiation in Special and Express Course

With effect from 2008, the Special and Express course will merge into the “Express Course”.

This step has been taken by the ministry of Education after realising that more Express students were taking the Higher Mother Tongue, thus blurring any difference between these two courses.

This blur could have been the result of the change of studying the HMTL criteria. The first change was made is 1995, when the criteria to studying Higher Mother Tongue in secondary schools was expanded to include the top 11 to 20 percent of a cohort. Four years later, the cohort intake increased to 30 percent. In 2004, the requirement of scoring an A for English was removed too.

The Special Course was initiated in 1979 for students who were the top 10 percent of the PSLE cohort and would have to take Higher Chinese Language in the SAP schools. This criteria’s were then extended to non-SAP schools with the expansion of Higher Mother Tongue Language in Malay and Tamil as well.

With this merger, schools now have greater flexibility to organize their classes and diminish and differences between the Special and Express Courses.

This change will not affect the status of SAP schools and their admissions criteria’s.

Source: www.moe.gov.sg