Abstract
Purpose – It is a normal practice that students’ overall scores are computed by simple average (SA) method which considers all academic subjects as having the same weights or same degree of importance. This paper highlights the application of simple weighted average (SWA) as an alternative method in aggregating students’ academic achievements. The weights of the academic subjects must be determined prior to the use of SWA. Methodology – In a case study, a group of five teachers from one primary school was asked to rate five main subjects taught in primary schools according to their importance. These five teachers have taught the five subjects for more than six years. The obtained weights values were used to re-compute 2011 mid-semester final examination scores of 33 year-six pupils at the selected primary school. Findings – The teachers decided to give different weight to three subjects, but same weights to two subjects. Furthermore, the SWA scores give different ranking to the pupils as compared to the SA scores. Another sentence or two needed here to explain the findings. Significance – It is argued that the use of the SWA method is more suitable than the simple average method in finding the overall scores of students’ achievements. The SWA method considers the subjects to have different degrees of importance, as they do in the actual educational context.
Highlights
For the past few years, schools in Malaysia have been introduced applying information systems for administrative and education management
The aggregation method provided in the Integrated Students Information System (ISIS) is a Simple Average (SA) method and the final score for every student is obtained by summing all his/ her scores of different subjects and dividing the sum by the number of subjects
This paper suggests Simple Weighted Average (SWA) method as an alternative method to simple averages in finding the final single scores
Summary
For the past few years, schools in Malaysia have been introduced applying information systems for administrative and education management. The overall scores of students are provided as composite scores which are calculated as the simple average of the four tests scores. In another context as reported by Yao (2010), the SA method is adopted in TerraNovaTM, a product of CTB/McGraw-Hill, which measures five main content areas or subjects: Mathematics, Reading, Language, Science and Social Studies. Parents, teachers and students assign academic subjects different levels of importance. This paper focuses on a different type of composite method which considers the relative importance of the subjects taught in one primary school in Malaysia. SA rankings were based on scores which treated all subjects as having equal degree of importance, whereas SWA scores resulted from giving different importance to the subjects
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