Penerbit Ilmu Bakti, RM29.90, ISBN 978-629-7569-18-5
Education, 2023

At first, I didn’t want to touch reference books for SPM Pendidikan Moral (or Moral Education in English) because I’m Muslim, so I had to take Pendidikan Islam or Islamic Education for my SPM.

Therefore, I don’t have any personal experience with the SPM Pendidikan Moral paper.

Still, I’ve always found this train wreck of a subject fascinating, and I have people writing in to know of my thoughts of what is easily the worst SPM subject and paper —bar none— in existence.

What’s So Bad about Pendidikan Moral?

The very idea of forcing people of different shapes, sizes, and philosophies to conform into a single thought bubble is terrible in itself and feels like something more at home in a communist country than a supposedly democratic one like Malaysia.

It gets worse when the syllabus and the exam are written by what seems like octogenarians still stuck in a black and white TV movie mindset while having never left the house or touched grass in the last five decades. The perfect utopia described in this subject never exists except in feel good movies in the black and white TV era.

What candidates learn from this subject, therefore, is how to lie in order to appease the authorities and get ahead in life.

Anyway, Revisi Sukses SPM: Pendidikan Moral is the only book closest to a proper reference book in the market, and even then, it’s more easily located on an online bookstore than a physical one.

The publisher, Penerbit Ilmu Bakti, has since pivoted to publishing quick reference books and mock examination papers, so subsequent editions of this book have been rebranded into a quick reference book, the practice questions all removed, and the reference notes compressed into smaller sized pages.

The Authors

The publisher never indicates whether the authors are teachers, speakers, trainers, or anything else, and my online search fails to yield anything on Joanne Tan and Malek Mat Akib.

Design

• Pretty standard and given that this is the closest one gets to a reference book, beggars can’t be choosers.
• There are colorful images, diagrams, charts, and more.
• The layout is neat and readable.

How About the Content?

The best reasons to get this book, aside from it being the one in the market, are that:

• It contains a list of what seems like definitive nilai murni or virtuous traits that the candidate is expected to drop into their answers, as well as the definition of these nilai-nilai murni. This will be helpful indeed.
• Each subsequent chapter also lists down the relevant nilai-nilai murni that apply to that chapter. Again, this can be helpful in certain situations.
• Opening the book is a nice section that summarizes every chapter in the tedious and eye-rolling Form 4 and Form 5 Pendidikan Moral textbooks, so it’s handy for a quick refresher read now and then.
• Perhaps the best reason to get this book is, provided the candidate has the spare cash to invest in a copy, to give the candidate a confidence boost. It gives the candidate something to hold on to, instead of walking into the examination hall blind.

However, how one truly studies for this subject is hard to quantify or qualify, because it’s very subjective and one is playing the “guess what is in the answer scheme” game. I don’t know whether the actual SPM paper is like it is presented in this book or the authors are just being weird — closed paper, remember — but this book is a head-scratcher.

Now, this paper is a lot like the SPM Bahasa Melayu Kertas 1 or composition paper, and for that SPM Bahasa Melayu Kertas 1 paper, one of the criteria used to judge the candidates’ compositions is that the maturity level of the opinions presented should be appropriate for a 17- to 18-year-old.

However, in this book, on page 54, there is an image of a man about to belt a terrified and crying woman, and the candidate is asked, and I translate to English:

What are your feelings if your family experience the same problem as the one presented in the image? Discuss. 

Here is the answer provided by the authors:

• I feel sad, because my parents are always fighting.
• I feel stressed by the situation.

Really? “Sad”? “Stressed”? I supposed the whole “candidates should express opinions of an appropriate maturity level” thing doesn’t apply here.

Another question linked to the image asks the following:

Predict the implications on the children if this situation persists until the children become adults.

You may be thinking of PTSD, problems trusting and interacting with other people, or even the risk of these children becoming abusers. Wrong!

• The children become emotionally unstable.
• Their education will be affected.

Is this reference book meant for older teenagers or primary school children? What kind of vapid, infantile answers are these?

Based on your knowledge, suggest steps to avoid having your family members fight with one another.

Call the cops on abusive family members? Nope!

• Report problems with the parents to the grandparents.
• Suggest to the parents that they attend counselling.

Yes, because the abusive father will nod and agree to go to counselling when the kids bring it up instead of taking the belt to them too.

Goodness. If the questions in this book mirror those in the actual SPM paper, I know I will likely fail the paper because I don’t think like a 12-year-old.

The rest of this book being filled with such stupid answers to their own questions aside, the answers provided are frequently flawed.

The answers are listed to show where each point in the allocated mark goes to, but more often than not, the allocation falls short of the maximum marks. It is common to see a question listed as being worth 10 marks, but the provided answers add up to only 5 to 7 marks maximum. Where will the extra marks come from? Quality of handwriting?

Conclusion

• The candidate sitting for Pendidikan Moral for their SPM may want to own this book anyway because it’s better than nothing.
• However, the fundamental flaws of the paper mean that it’s hard to define a proper way to prepare for this exam other than trying very hard to think like a very sheltered 12-year-old whose worldview is formed from government propaganda. Older generations and the government are never wrong and should never be crossed or even disagreed with, teenagers are always at fault and incapable of making good decisions unless directed to by said older generations and government, and conformity and blind dedication to putting the country above self — these are the actual unwritten fundamentals of Pendidikan Moral that one need to remember when answering the questions in the paper.

If you have to sit for this paper, don’t feel too envious of those sitting for the Pendidikan Islam paper, however.

• Yes, in some ways Pendidikan Islam is better because a part of Kertas 1 is based on facts, so it’s not 100% subjective nonsense like the Pendidikan Moral paper.
• However, candidates for Pendidikan Islam also have to sit for a Kertas 2: an oral exam that tests the candidate on how well they memorize and recite sentences and verses from the Quran.
• Imagine not knowing Bahasa Arab or Jawi and having to memorize “squiggles” as well as imitate the melody and tonality that goes into reading these “squiggles” in a language that one has no clue about.
• That Kertas 2 is half of the total marks of the entire SPM paper, so yikes indeed.

Maybe we can all just agree that forcing school students Muslims and non-Muslims into groupthink and conformity, as dictated by out-of-touch old people, is a bad idea all around!