Sasbadi, RM39.90, ISBN 978-983-77-3867-6
Education, 2024

Sejarah, which means History in Bahasa Melayu, is a must-pass Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) subject for those that wish to continue pursuing their college or pre-university studies at a government-run educational institution.

Even if the candidate loves that subject, there’s no denying that the paper itself is torture in a high-stress environment. Paper 1 is fine, as it’s multiple-choice questions, but Paper 2 is a lot of writing as one need to complete structured and essay questions within a tight time limit. It doesn’t take much for a crucial information to evaporate from the brain due to stress, and then it’s time to panic.

Worse, it is one of the very few SPM papers outside of the language subjects that require the candidates to answer in complete sentences, so there is no short cut to save time.

So, is Masterclass SPM: Sejarah helpful to any candidate that rightfully dreads this paper?

Authors

The authors have been writing Sejarah books for a while now, and the publisher touts Zamri Talib as a former SPM Sejarah examiner, a teacher with almost 30 years of experience, and a lecturer on best techniques on answering this paper.

Design

I’m repeating myself in every review of the Masterclass SPM books, but I’ll say it again: the design is impeccable, very impressive to a degree that I have never seen before in SPM reference books from other publishers.

The use of colors aside, this book is much wider than normal. This is because every page comes with a 6.5 cm-wide colored side bar that is used for annotations as well as a box for one to put in the date when they revised a certain chapter.

This side bar is fantastic because there is more than enough space to put in one’s own notes. In this case, one can write in new words one has learned and their meanings, advice and tips from elsewhere, URLs, and other details to make this the one-stop reference book for one’s English revision needs.

The fact that one can jot down notes also makes this book the perfect vehicle for active learning, which research has found to be far more effective than just passive reading. With plenty of space to add in notes, illustrations, and even small mind maps, this book is designed for this very purpose, so much kudos to the people that did the design and layout.

After all, given that this is Sejarah, there will be plenty of extra things to joy down!

However, unlike the other books in this line, this book can appear cluttered due to the number of flow charts and diagrams that eat up a lot of the content real estate. Still, it’s not a deal breaker as far as I’m concerned.

Content

There are enough lovely colors, diagrams, flow charts, and more to keep things interesting.

One crucial noteworthy factor here is that, unlike many other SPM Sejarah reference books out there, the reference notes are written almost entirely in complete sentences that are also very readable. This is important because:

• History is basically a long novel. One needs to understand the “story” well to put everything together—the plot, the cast (and the correct spelling of everyone’s names!), chronology, and more—in order to answer questions that will test the candidates on explaining and rationalizing various instances in Malaysian history.
• Therefore, for weaker candidates, reading these reference notes is like reading a novel, as the sentences are written in a way that is also engaging and descriptive. It’s easy to follow the “flow” of events in each chapter.

Additionally, each chapter begins with a page detailing what the candidates need to know by the end of the chapter as well as a mind map illustrating the ins and outs of the chapter. There are side boxes with sample questions and answers, information on what the QR codes in the textbooks lead one to, and some extra facts now and then.

There is a generous amount of practice questions as well.

All this seems basic reference book material, but one thing really makes this book stand out: the audio notes.

Those Audio Notes

Each section of a chapter come with a QR code that leads to a downloadable audio file of that section.

Yes, all Masterclass SPM books have this feature, but it’s very helpful in this case because Sejarah is such a memorization-heavy subject.

The files can be downloaded, so they can be listened to when one is doing anything else like eating, sitting on the toilet, doing housework under the parents’ orders… this is helpful as listening to the audio notes help to reinforce one’s memory of the huge number of facts one needs to cram in the brain.

Sure, it’s just a guy, probably AI, robotically reading aloud the notes in each section, but while it may not be compelling listening, it’s an extra-value learning mode offered by this book that could make a difference in the exam hall!

How about the KBAT?

This is where this book stumbles pretty significantly.

It seems to operate on the principle that KBAT in Sejarah is still asking candidates about important moral values linked to this or that.

In fact, the actual SPM Sejarah paper has moved on, with the KBAT component of the essay questions now leaning harder toward asking candidates to study a visual stimulus, infer and deduce the key messages in the visual stimulus, and then elaborate on their thoughts.

The “what important values have you learned from so and so” questions are still there, but they are mostly relegated to the structured questions.

Now, KBAT components make up about 25% of the overall Paper 2 scores, so they could very well be the obstacle standing between a current grade and the next higher grade.

Therefore, the dated practice KBAT questions of this book can be a flaw, although a part of me questions how significant this flaw is. Unlike KBAT of other subjects, the KBAT components of Sejarah rely more on one’s common sense and ability to write bull feces. A candidate that is reasonably okay with the karangan respons terhad and rumusan components in SPM Bahasa Melayu would likely be fine with the SPM Sejarah KBAT questions, while those taking the SPM Pendidikan Moral paper will have even more practice in fine honing their bull feces skills.

A good KBAT answer will still need some actual examples from history to back up various points and arguments, of course. However, ideally the candidate should have no problems supplying these examples if they had done enough preparation for the paper and their brain doesn’t melt down from the moment that they take their seat in the examination hall.

Conclusion

• Presentation and design – excellent.
• While the content is pretty standard, the presentation and linguistic style make it easy reading, which is a plus given that one likely has to reread a chapter a few times to “get everything in”.
• The audio notes are worth the price of this book, as the files are downloadable and can be listened to over and over to give the brain the extra boost in remembering all those facts.
• However, the KBAT components are very dated and do not represent the present-day type of KBAT questions in the SPM Sejarah paper. One should practice on past year exam questions to get a better idea of what their SPM Sejarah paper would be like.