PETALING JAYA: The national average grade of the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) results for the 2020 batch of students is the best in the past five years, education minister Radzi Jidin said today.
He said the average grade was 4.8 compared to 4.86 in 2019. A lower grade indicates that candidates performed better.
“If you look at the trend of the national average grade from 2016 to 2020, this was the best average grade in the past five years,” he told a press conference, pointing out a steadily declining trend from 5.05 in 2016 to 4.8 last year.
For core subjects, the 2020 batch of students performed better in mathematics, science, history, Islamic studies and moral studies. However, students performed worse in the Malay and English languages compared to the batch in 2019.
There were improved results in a total of 43 subjects, while 39 subjects recorded a decline and one remained the same.
A total of 401,105 registered candidates sat for the exam in 3,310 examination centres across the country, with a total of 83 subjects involved.
Radzi said students in urban and rural areas both performed better in their results, but candidates in the former showed bigger improvements.
Students eligible to obtain their SPM certificate went up from 86.72% in 2019 to 88.68%, while special needs candidates eligible to get their certificate also increased from 61.34% last year to 68.22%.
Those who failed to qualify to get their certificate will resit for either their Malay language, history or maths exams in mid-September.-FMT