Repetition of Writing Topics in the Secondary School Certificate Examination and Students' Dependence on Memorisation

Abstract

The paper reports on a study that explored the issue of repetition of writing topics in the SSC examination in Bangladesh and students‘ dependence of memorisation. In order to investigate to what extent writing topics are repeated in the SSC examination and what the students‘ attitudes are towards memorisation of the writing items, the present quantitative study sampled 116 students through a questionnaire. Moreover, English question papers of seven years‘ SSC examination were analysed through quantitative content analysis. The study found out that the same or similar writing topics were repeated frequently in the SSC examination, and as a washback effect of this, most of the students made a short list of the probable writing topics and memorised them from guidebooks. As a result, the writing items cannot test the ̳construct‘ of the writing test which is the students‘ writing ability; rather it tests the students‘ ability to remember and reproduce. This discrepancy between the curriculum and the actual test testifies the lack of validity of the English writing tests in the SSC examination, since according to Lado (1961), a test is valid only if it measures what it is supposed to measure.