The Bridge Between Secondary School and University-Level Education

Published: July 14, 2025

As a university freshman, it is important to realise the differences in how you are expected to learn, amidst your transition into university.

In secondary school, there is one set of standardized tests set to occur every year, and everyone has to sit through them. Past year papers are available for us to practice, and we know for a fact that the format is more or less the same in every iteration. This opens up opportunities for a very natural human behaviour to take place: strategization.

I can’t speak for the entire world, but based on the pre-university educations I received here in Malaysia, “teaching to the test” has been extremely common. The primary objective of most (if not all) secondary school teachers is to get you prepared towards “the holy grand ultimate finale examination”, and it is part of their “KPI” to have their students pass the exams with flying colours. Exam grades are, at its core, a measure of academic performance, and that leads us to the perfect position to mention Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

Evidently (or at least hopefully), a large portion of secondary school maths teacher appreciates the beauty of mathematics. In their day-to-day teaching, however, what they will teach is rather restricted by what will be tested in the exams. At times, they have the option to spend some time mentioning topics that are mathematically interesting yet out of syllabus, but few would choose to do so, for the more beneficial thing to do in the short run is to solve more examples of what will come out in the exams. Moreover, few students would retain their attention upon hearing the phrase “this thing won’t be tested”. This leaves little to no opportunities for the “beauty of mathematics” to be communicated to students. What is eventually taught is not mathematics, but the methodology of solving maths problems that come out in exams. For this reason, students who get an A in mathematics can’t be immediately regarded as an excellent mathematician, and certainly not all of them will even survive a major in mathematics. What is certain is only the fact that they have aced that particular exam.

One more example, this time based on personal experiences: the language subjects. As a Malaysian from an independent high school, I had to take English, Malay and Chinese as my language subjects. All three subjects have one thing in common: the reading and writing components are highly emphasized, while the speaking and listening components are basically non-existent. Essays during exams are graded according to a grading scheme, and only ideas mentioned in the grading scheme will be awarded marks. This means unconventional ideas and writing styles will not be entertained. In what universe will this type of system promotes interests of students towards writing? For this reason, I used to dislike writing back then. Regardless, I pushed through and got an A1 for Malay, and an A2 for English and Chinese (A1 is better than A2). Ironically, my daily life today predominantly revolves around the use of English, and I developed an interest towards writing because I get to write whatever I want. In contrast, I cannot, and has never been able to, maintain a coherent conversation in Malay. So, did the secondary school education succeed in teaching me three languages? No, though my teachers did a great job giving me tips on how to write essays that the graders wanted to see.

I think it remains an interesting debate to decide whether this is good or bad, or whether we have any better options when it comes to pre-university education. It suffices to say that at this stage, the main purpose of grades is really to open doors for you to get admitted into a decent university, possibly with scholarships. What matters is the number of A’s in your transcript, but not the individual subjects.

Now that you are in a university, it is of utmost importance that you move on from the “grind past-year papers and ace the exams” mindset, as it no longer aligns with the main objectives of most university-level courses. Over here, the exam questions will be set by the teaching team. Our intention is to get you to learn and nothing else. In particular, I have worked with enough number of lecturers to say that overly deliberate attempts to optimize towards exams are typically frowned upon. It is not a catastrophically bad behaviour (think academic dishonesty), but certainly one that will harm you in the long run. Attempting the past year papers to reinforce and evaluate your understanding, or to make sure that you don’t get too nervous during the actual one, is indeed encouraged, and are the reasons we still release past year / sample papers. Analyzing the question types and memorizing the answers is just not worth it and doesn’t help with learning at all.

Of course, as much as we require you not to optimize towards the exams, it is also the teaching team’s responsibility to design the paper so that it is difficult to optimize towards, and that marks are given to students who demonstrate genuine understanding as much as possible. This is easier said than done, and there have been countless instances of exam papers getting criticised as too mechanical, too much of an IQ test, or having too unfair of a marks distribution (making a simple calculation error loses you 10 marks that kind). Moreover, some students learn differently. They might need a little more time but will ultimately come out to achieve deeper understanding. These students will have their grades doomed by the deadlines they have to catch, but are not a bad learner at all.

As we continue to spend efforts on desiging better and better assessments, it is important to recognise that at the present, GPA isn’t that relevant of a metric to optimize for at all. Your GPA remains a measure of academic performance, which is never truly accurate in the first place, one of the strongest reasons being that it really only measures your performance over one semester. If you will eventually go out and find jobs, at most the first one or two employers will care about your GPA, when there is nothing else for them to rely on to evaluate your suitability. Afterwards, it is your past internship experiences, personal projects, and a little bit of diplomacy that lands you jobs (take this with a grain of salt, im aiming to get into academia so i dont really know much about whats going on nowadays).

Having chosen your own major, I want all of you to understand that you are here to learn, and henceforth by all means, try to develop the curiosity to do so if you haven’t yet.