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Solace of the Shadows
Sunday, April 30, 2006
So the exams are finally over and another term has been laid to rest. 3 months of school-free life have begun. And so i am faced with the dilemma of how to spend this time. It's like spending your progress package. Should you live for the moment and blow your several hundred bucks like a carefree wildchild, or should you level-headedly put it in a bank or buy some shares or give it to your parents or something.
The problem is compounded by the realization that these 3 months of undisrupted holidays could very well be its last for the next few DECADES to come. This time next year i'd be having the professional attachment, and this time next next year i'd have GRADUATED and begun a life to the office. So, everything seems to point towards the former doesn't it.
Just one thing i wanted to put down before i forgot. I could go on and on about the shortcomings of Singapore's tertiary system. But this is something which has been bugging me.
NTU has this wonderful system where they make you slog for the entire term, then they make you sit for the exams. But there is nothing beyond that. Put simply, you study, you take exam, and you get the grade. Therein lies the frustration. You just GET THE GRADE.
You log in to the network, and you view your entire semester's hard work and efforts encapsulated and packaged conveniently in a single letter. And that's the end of it. You're made to accept it, whether or not you feel you deserved it. Beyond that, any attempt to find out where you might have gone wrong is suppressed and squashed like a bug. Your only avenue is to pay $10 bucks (or is it $15?) to the school's admin in a futile attempt to get your paper reviewed, only to find out that it is truly, futile. There's no way of knowing which questions you made careless mistakes in, or whether the marker failed to even mark the paper properly to begin with.
And our system wonders why Singapore students are so grade oriented? It is almost laughable. I do not understand how anyone can learn anything when all you do is study and take papers, and get graded. But beyond that, no further learning takes place. I do not know where my errors were committed in taking the paper, neither do i know how i may go about resolving these errors. And so these errors are likely to be carried forth just like a static budgetary system. When students do not get their desired grades, and don't know why, what is their only option? That option is to hit the books harder than before. And so this self-perpetuating disease creates this mugging environment we have grown to loathe in Singapore.
How do we fight this system. Why do we continue to sit back in apathy. Even i can't satisfactorily think why.
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