Position Paper 4

Noor Nadirah bt Zainal

0727636

“Since most of the assessment instruments in the market were made based on American culture, Muslim counselors should not use standardized assessments at all.” Discuss.

Personality assessment, career assessment, ability assessment are the examples of assessment instrument in the market nowadays. The similar things about this assessment are they were made by the Western scholar according to the American culture. For example, one of the career assessments is made by John Holland, the western philosopher. Most of the school counselor used the Holland’s career assessment as an instrument for them to analyze their students’ suitable career.

In my point of view, I believe that Muslim counselors should use the standardized assessments in the market as well as to create the new assessment according to the Islamic culture. For me, that is nothing wrong if the Muslim counselors use the instrument from Western, because there are founded by a great philosopher and the result is valid.

Besides that, Muslim counselor should come out with their own assessment instruments. For example like what Professor Dr Sidek Mohd Noah from University Putra Malaysia had done. He had come out with his personality assessment. Although he is modifying from the Western instrument according to Malaysian culture, but we can see his effort to create something that can contribute to Malaysian education.

In market nowadays, there are only a few instruments created by Muslim philosopher and it will make the counselor faced the difficulties to choose which one is the best and appropriate to use. So, in order to get the best instrument, we should not too consider either it comes from the any culture or origin, as long as there are not aggressively violated from the Malaysian culture, the counselor can still use it.

For example, the personality assessment that was produced by Sigmund Freud. In Malaysia, we are not suggested to use it to our students because Freud use to analyze on the sexual aspects. This is not appropriate to use because our personality is not being shape by the sexual drive only, but also others factor like, environment, peers, and educational level.

In the other hand, some people might say that the counselor should not used the standardized instrument because we are not live in the same culture. Every culture has their own belief. It is true but, we have the option to choose which one is suitable for our culture because there a lot of choice of assessment there.

As a conclusion, it is firmly said that the Muslim counselor should use the standardized assessment and must follow the Islamic teaching to avoid any misunderstanding.