Difficult exam papers and the absurdity of it

Before my Maths Tutee took her Math exams, she was remarking to me that she was most likely going to fail the paper because it was rumored to be set at a very difficult level. And the reason for the difficult paper? It was to show other schools that her school has a high math standard.

And so she failed it terribly. Looking at her test paper, I could see why, for it was a really difficult paper. Needless to say, I think most of the other students in the school would have done disastrously for it as well(the school is a neighbourhood school)

But just what purposes are exam papers meant to serve? To wayang to other schools that they have a high standard for maths(when in actual fact their students are not even halfway there)? I think this is just absurd. Even if this was not the aim of the paper setter, I don't see the reason why they would need to set difficult papers. But sadly, I think this is the trend of the Singaporean education system: nevermind that the students can't really understand or handle the material, as long as we give them questions that are much more difficult than the O levels to 'practice', they will do well at O levels.

In my opinion, exam papers are meant to serve as 1) Practice/trial runs for the actual O level exams. 2) Evaluation and feedback about the student's grasp of the material 3) Training of exam taking skills like time management. Thus a good paper should be able to mirror the actual exam standards, and also be able to sort out the students' ability in the subject (ie differenciate those who are very poor, poor, average, above average, good, outstanding, in terms of marks). This means a balanced mix of very easy to difficult questions should be included.

This brings to mind my days at HCJC where most of the college was on this difficult papers system, where only a very small handful could get As and Bs for the internal exams while most struggled to pass. This, mind you, is in a top end college where if you threw a stone during A level results annoucement, there's a 50% chance that you will hit someone with 4As. Fortunately I was mostly not under this system as under the Humanities programme my tutors adopted a WYSIWYG(in line with A levels standard, albeit slightly harder, with none of those skewed bell curves of the rest of college).

The biggest victims of all these difficult papers in the end are going to be the students, especially the weaker to average ones. In our academic, grade focused education culture, failing paper after paper (not due to laziness/inability of students) is a great discouragement and source of stress. For those who see grades as an indicator of self worth(or have great pressure from parents to do well) a low self esteem, depression, high stress levels are all likely to result. On the other end of the spectrum, some just give up on their studies, for afterall there's no visible results/improvements from putting in the effort to study anyway, and everyone's scoring so badly (whether they studied or not).