Frustrated SPM Students Burned Their Add Maths Books Because The Exam Was Too Difficult
"Dear add math let me express in term my frustration."
By Tamara Jayne — 29 Nov 2018, 12:54 PM
We've all been there before.
Reaching our breaking point of studying like this group of frustrated SPM students who recently set fire to their Additional Mathematics textbooks and question papers.
Photos of the textbook burning in a pile of ashes were posted by a Twitter user on Tuesday, 27 November.
The caption read: "Dear add math let me express in term my frustration. #SPM2018"
Based on his replies on the Twitter thread, the boy seemed to have been extremely frustrated by the difficulty of the paper.
The tweet went viral, as netizens criticised the students for their actions
"Recycle la, or at least sell it. That is knowledge. All of you who burned the books can cause the atmospheric layers to get thinner. You already know and make noise about how hot the weather is but then you yourself cause air pollution and heat," wrote one person.
"Brothers and sisters, no matter how difficult or easy those Add Math questions are, it does not justify the action of burning the book. Fine! The question is so difficult to the point that your head feels like bursting but is it really to the point that burning the book was necessary?" replied another netizen.
The tweeter shared a screenshot of a comment by a teacher who also agreed that the Add Maths questions were difficult
"My child (Maktab Rendah Sains MARA student) informed me that the Add Maths questions were difficult. Their teacher also admitted that Paper 1 was difficult. Their teacher assured them that if Paper 1 was difficult, then Paper 2 would be easy," she wrote.
However, when the child sat for Paper 2, he found that the questions were very different from previous years.
"When my child came out from the hall, he saw the smart students crying because the questions were so difficult," she wrote, adding that she found out the next day that he hadn't called her after the exam because he was very frustrated and worried that the exam questions could extinguish his dreams of scoring an A.
In addition, the teacher said that her child had finished all of the books she bought for them, including exercises that were provided by their teachers. "That's not even including all the intensive tuition that I gave every time they came home for the holidays," she added.
The boy has since responded in a following tweet apologising for what they did
"I apologise to everyone. I have already asked my juniors, they don't want it because they want the latest 'past year' book with SPM 2018 and additionally the book is already used and they want the latest. It's not that I don't want to give it to my juniors and siblings," he wrote.
