ASSESSMENT papers and worksheets help teachers and students to track their progress and should be contextualised with classroom teaching.

As such, they should not be made available online for all to have a go at it, said Senior Minister of State for Education Grace Fu on Wednesday.

She was responding to a call from Ms Denise Phua, MP for Jalan Besar GRC, for assessment papers and worksheets to be put online so that parents would not have to buy them for their children.

Ms Phua also suggested that the Ministry of Education consider putting lectures, especially academic ones for all stakeholders, and not just for teachers.

'In fact Ivy League universities like Yale, Berkeley, and I believe, Stanford have already put their lectures available online through podcast for sharing globally,' she said. 'I think we can try to model that, maybe do it at the primary and secondary school level where we are still upgrading teachers,' she said during the debate on the MOE's budget.

Responding, Mrs Fu said putting assessment worksheets online may not stop parents from buying them.

'We are in a society where parents naturally place a lot of emphasis on education and they want to provide the best, and I think there's no lack of creativity and ingenuity in our education sector to always provide what is best and what is better than the last version of assessment or enrichment books that will help our children.'

She added: "While I agree and think that there should be some sharing of such materials... we have to be careful how we want to make assessments readily available on a universal basis because we'll like assessment to be really relevant to what we have taught. In other words, it has to be contextualised.

'It's not just putting any assessment on the website and make that available and everybody could go in and have a go at it. We want our assessments to be effective, in that it actually helps teachers and students assess their progress so it has to be contextualised with what the teacher is teaching in class.'