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Subashini Sinnappan, 12, returned home from school in northern Penang state on Monday, tied a blanket around a ceiling fan and hanged herself in a tragedy that has saddened Malaysia and sparked a debate over what one newspaper described as 'the annual battle for As'.
Her parents, unskilled factory workers, returned home from work to see their only child dead. A note in Tamil on the table said: 'Sorry I did not get all As.'
Getting all As is the dream of every student in the Year Six exams  taken by about 500,000 students every September.
The determination to excel in the Malay Primary School Assessement Test   is strongest among Tamils, who form 8 per cent of the population of 26 million and are the most depressed economically.
Education is often their only route out of abject poverty and, like other Tamil parents, Subashini's  parents had pushed her and expected her to score A's in all seven subjects. She received B and C grades.
'She pushed herself too much, everybody was pushing her. We blame ourselves,' local newspapers quoted Mr Sinnappan as saying.
Every year several students, mostly Tamils, commit suicide after scoring less than they hoped for.
Their deaths have sparked demands to scrap the exams  and for the government to  create more opportunities for Tamils to prevent depression and hopelessness.
Although all children continue to junior high school irrespective of their exam performance, the results have become  'one big battlefield, a battle for As ... and woe betides anyone who falters', wrote A.Kathirasen, a columnist with the News Straits Times. 'We all are partly to be blamed for Subashini's death because of our high expectations and our mad rush to reward those with straight As,' he said.
Some parents and teachers variously blame the media for putting stress on young children. The media gives back-to-back coverage of the primary school exam results, focusing exclusively on 'all-A' students.
A favourite media tactic is to take the high achiever to his parent's workplace and show the result slip to them for a cute photo.
The media uniformly ignores students without straight As, giving the impression they are failures.
'Schools are also to blame for feting their best students and ignoring the underachievers,' retired headmaster Ravindran Rasiah said. 'The system unfairly makes many students feel they are failures.'
The government, under pressure from parents and education experts who say the exams serve no purpose, is considering scraping them.
Although a minority, the suicide rate among Tamils is the highest among the races, averaging 35 per 100,000, compared with six for Malays, (60 per cent of the population) and 15 for Chinese (30 per cent). The global average is 16 per 100,000.
Tamil leaders have repeatedly urged the government to create more opportunities for their children. Most are descendents of 19th century indentured labourers from South India, who have been by-passed by the country's economic growth.
'Tamils have traditionally suffered from lack of opportunities but in recent years the situation has worsened dramatically with the influx of foreign cheap labour that has taken away jobs traditionally held by Tamils,' said Ramasamy Palanisamy, former professor of political science at the National University of Malaya.
'Where for other races the pie has expanded, for the Tamil minority it has shrunk. So Tamil students are under tremendous pressure to score all As.
'Some see suicide as the only solution for failure. It is a tragedy.'



Suicide  highlights cruelty of A grade fight