MATSEC - or student - confusion?

Having taken the same 'A' Level subjects as Mike Said (The Sunday Times, June 10), barring Economics, I cannot help but feel that Mr Said seems to think of himself as a victim of the MATSEC system. While he does present a couple of valid facts, they are backed by very opinionated and faulty arguments, which probably misled some readers.

I agree with Mr Said that the amount of Grade As achieved at this level is incredibly low, but I disagree that students like him were discriminated against in the Shakespeare section just because they studied Much Ado About Nothing.

One cannot speak about the questions being set as "unfair" - if one studies a set text, then one should be ready for every eventuality in the paper. How he can say that the questions set on King Lear were "impossibly easy"? Clearly, he would only be in a position to pass such a judgment had he studied both texts!

Mr Said complains about the format of the French 'A' Level paper, stating that the exam is "confusing" and it is "all literature-based". It is true students have to write four literature essays in three hours, but I cannot understand how he can claim that it is easy to confuse characters from different texts. If one studies sufficiently for the exam, then one is certainly not going to find oneself in such a conundrum.

Mr Said should look at the MATSEC syllabus to check the way candidates are graded. The language sections, which include Paper I, II and IV and are all written in French, total 250 marks out of the 400 assigned to the whole paper. The literature section is only assigned 100 marks on 400, which amounts to a fourth of the paper.

The French 'A' Level also has an Oral Examination which totals the remaining 50 marks in the paper. It seems to me that Mr Said must have only sat for a fragment of a five-section paper.

He also complains that in the Systems of Knowledge paper, there were no questions relating to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Double Helix in one section of the paper. This statement is also false, even though the questions were worded in such a way that the titles of these books were not mentioned. One could have easily made reference to these books in writing the answers.

There are undoubtedly some serious problems within the Maltese exam system that seem to be getting increasingly worse as time goes by. Unfortunately, these are often not highlighted or are lost in letters such as Mr Said's, and valid points are overshadowed by weak, and often misinformed, arguments.