She thanked Sri Murugan Centre (SMC) director Surain Kanda for raising the issue with her ministry, emphasising the importance of the government working alongside communities to improve education, New Straits Times reported.
“The issue of moral studies was raised, and given the anxieties of parents and the community, I have directed the Malaysian Examinations Syndicate to review and improve the subject,” she said at the 2026 Kalvi Yutham programme held at SJK (T) Castlefield in Puchong today.
Selangor education department director Wan Nor Ashikin Abd Kassim was also present.
In April, FMT reported that education advocates were to meet the federal territories education department following complaints over the grading of the 2025 SPM moral studies paper, with one tutoring centre reporting that none of its students scored an A grade in the paper.
Some who performed well in other subjects were reported to have obtained unexpected lower grades for the moral studies paper.
Muda vice-president Siva Prakash said the complaint was raised by Sri Murugan Centre, a non-profit education organisation, which claimed that many students were missing out on the matriculation programme because weaker-than-expected results in the paper have caused them to fall short of the 10A requirement.
He said many students and parents have long felt that the subject is unusually hard to score in, especially when students who do well in other papers end up with a B in the subject or lower.
Siva, a former country manager for UK exam board Edexcel, said the main problem is that students and teachers were not clearly told how the final grades are decided.
He said SPM grades are based on a moderation framework where grade boundaries are adjusted according to cohort performance and paper difficulty, but are not shown transparently.
Surain said today the moral studies exam should be an open paper using an “analytical marking” approach.
He also raised concerns about the subject’s grading threshold, saying the requirement to score 95 and above for an A+ is unreasonably high.
He urged the government to increase the number of matriculation placements for the Indian community to 2,500, without compromising the quotas of other communities.