Can Merit Demerit System solve disciplinary problems in schools?
Disciplinary problems in schools have been on the increase, particularly in secondary schools. I am posting this problem as I believe many schools are facing these problems. Any system introduced to curb disciplinary problems must be fair to students. Several years ago, Education Department had encouraged schools to introduce Merit Demerit System to curb increasing disciplinary problems in schools. However, implementing it will take up a lot of discipline teachers’ time. The schools must have a proper way of recording to keep track of students’ behaviour. It needs the cooperation of all the teachers for it to be successful. It is the amount of paper work that discourages most schools from its implementation.
I had developed a computer programme that may help in the implementation. With the implemetation of a computer Merit Demerit system, the burden of doing paper work will be reduced. Keeping track of records of all students in school will be taken care of by the system. All the teachers need to do is to enter into the system all the merits and demerits of every student as soon as possible so that the system can provide the up-to-date disciplinary information of the school.
The system that I developed will save teachers’ time in typing in students’ basic information. It can import student basic particulars from SMM. In the 1980s, the Ministry of Education had come up with different categories of indiscipline. Types of disciplinary problems were listed out with codes for easier analysis. In 1997, School Division introduced a computer program to record different types of discipline occurred in schools to provide feedback to the Education Department. The computer system, SSDM, made use of the existing system of disciplinary codes that was introduced earlier. Basically, teacher-in-charge has to key in all the disciplinary problems from their disciplinary record book, where teachers record wqhenever...