“Somehow it’s okay for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet, if I said ‘I never learned to read’, they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist and author
AN investment bank CEO WhatsApped me yesterday with a newspaper headline (pic) that left him visibly disheartened.

“Of all things,” he wrote, “this shouldn’t be one we tolerate.”
He referred to the number of SPM candidates who failed Mathematics in 2024 – 84,025 students or 22.4 per cent of the 375,115 who sat for the paper.
22.4 per cent!
To put that into perspective, 22.4 per cent is roughly equivalent to the entire Chinese population in Malaysia.
It’s also the same proportion that makes up the nation’s youngest demographic – children aged 0 to 14, according to Malaysia’s 2024 demographic statistics.
So yes, 22.4 per cent is a huge deal.
I don’t want to merely look at the fact that the failure rate has decreased (from 23.2 per cent in 2023.)
Instead, I’m focusing on the significance of the number 84,025.
WHERE IS THE QUALITY OF MATHEMATICS EDUCATION IN OUR COUNTRY?
Imagine hearing that students who have never passed Mathematics suddenly managed to get a solid A in the SPM exam – what about those who got B, C, D, E, or G in SPM?
It’s unsettling.
At its core, I’m genuinely worried about the direction our national education system is heading.
And that’s just Mathematics.
The picture gets bleaker when we turn to Additional Mathematics.
Although only 108,885 students took the subject, nearly 25 per cent failed.
Put it this way: if you have four siblings, odds are one of you would have failed Additional Mathematics.
If the number of candidates is already small, and we deduct those who passed – and consider only those who scored with distinction – how many will end up pursuing professional fields or critical courses at higher education levels?
That’s why I’ve always said: don’t fixate solely on the “results” or “outcomes”.
This isn’t a corporate setting where timeliness and a clean final deliverable are all that count.
Education is a process that demands clarity of concepts, mastery of fundamentals, and a solid grasp of first principles – long before tackling anything more advanced.
Because if the groundwork is shaky, how can we build something heavier, more complex, and more sophisticated on top of it?
What kind of global ambition are we promoting when 84,025 students crumble at basic calculus?
I say this not out of arrogance, but from lived experience.
Back in school, Mathematics and Additional Mathematics were my strongest subjects.
I got an A, won the school prize and frankly, I didn’t have to work very hard.
Naturally, I thought I was brilliant.
(Everything else? Total mess. Subjects that needed a lot of memorising? I flopped. Language classes were the worst – loads of rules, and I couldn’t keep up. And anything with tons of reading? Forget it. I’ve always been a slow reader.)
Then I arrived at Columbia.
Suddenly, I was surrounded by students from every corner of the world – many of whom would later become theoretical mathematicians or titans in quantitative finance.
A few have since become my toughest rivals in the investment banking arena.
For the first time, I saw the edge of my aptitude.
I immersed myself in rigorous research across real analysis, measure-theoretic probability, stochastic processes, and multivariate statistics, often exceeding the formal programme requirements to deepen my foundation under the mentorship of leading scholars in the field.
I wasn’t anywhere near the top of the class – at least not in the beginning.
It took eight brutal months of grinding – fighting through language barriers, unlearning shortcuts, and reprogramming how I approached problems – before something finally clicked.
(I won’t rehash it all here. That journey has been well documented in past columns.)
That was the moment I let go of an old belief I had clung to for years: that mathematical brilliance belonged only to certain groups.
It doesn’t.
Excelling in a Mathematics exam and truly mastering Mathematics as a discipline is very different.
There’s a difference between solving for x, building y and knowing why z matters.
The Ministry of Education – one reason I dream of unleashing my version of DOGE to overhaul the whole system – seems obsessed with “results”, driven by “sympathy”, and too quick to attribute shortcomings to divine intervention.
But what they overlook is the long-term damage caused when weak foundations in Mathematics begin to erode not just academic standards, but the entire fabric of our socioeconomic future.
This rot doesn’t stop at universities – it extends to the workplace, to national productivity, to generational knowledge transfer.
When today’s students grow up and become parents, many may be ill-equipped to support their children’s learning journeys, compounding the very failures they once endured.
It’s not that I’ve lost faith in the future or denied the role of divine will – but we’re already witnessing the rise of what I’d call a “mathematically blind” generation.
For instance, young teachers and TikTok tutors shamelessly resort to calculators for something as basic as 27 divided by 3.
I honestly can’t tell whether this is cognitive laziness or a deliberate attempt to legitimise shortcut thinking in math.
This is the inevitable result when fragile foundations go unchecked.
Don’t blame gadgets or “gadget-rush” culture when it’s the educators themselves who normalise gadget dependency.
“Just use a calculator, it’s there anyway.”
Where is the process of doing Mathematics when everything – every topic, every problem-solving activity – can be handed off to a device?
Supposedly, “education is about measuring human potential”, yet we deny the mind’s potential to perform mental calculations.
It’s like spitting into the wind – only to have it land squarely back on your face.
No wonder students collapse at the first signs of Algebra or Geometry.
Mathematics is detested simply because it never made sense in the first place.
A Form 2 concept such as algebraic manipulation – say, rewriting x = (3y – 1)/(y + 2) to isolate y – remains out of reach for over half of Form 5 students.
If that’s already a struggle, how will they cope with more complex trigonometric functions?
Much of the Mathematics syllabus today – whether at the primary or secondary level – has become increasingly nonsensical, overloaded with non-fundamental, non-essential, and often irrelevant content.
On Wednesday, a teacher WhatsApped me a Year 6 exam question on money.
It covered interest and dividends.
Under the KSSR curriculum, primary students are only meant to be introduced to the basic concepts of simple interest and dividends.
This question, however, went a step too far – it asked for loan repayment calculations, a concept typically taught in Form 3.
I’ll break this down in a future column.
The saddest part?
Whenever I raise these concerns, I’m quickly dismissed as “toxic”.
Yet the real toxicity lies with those who continue to hollow out our national education system from within – parasitic actors who defend the indefensible.
These are the same people who display staggering economic illiteracy: losing oil contracts because dumb politics trumps basic arithmetic, plunging further into household debt and utterly clueless when it comes to spotting investment scams.
There’s no use in lying – this fight isn’t for me.
It’s for our children.
It’s for the kind of country we want to build but constantly sabotage through short-sighted decisions and empty slogans.
Maybe next week, I’ll share what I told a group of teacher trainees recently – about how children should be learning math.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com