Are we really educated?

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

While students in Singapore know how to get good grades, they may not necessarily have acquired the breadth and depth of knowledge possible

By MONICA GWEE

OH DEAR, oh dear, it's that time of year when A levels are nearly over and for a good portion of the junior college and polytechnic crowd, it will soon be party time -- before the dreaded results.

Ah, yes, results. They define parts of you no exam can know, they wield power over your unclear future, and for the majority of Singapore students, they are the difference between getting into university and being turfed out into the cold of a "We reget to inform you" letter from the Admissions Office.

It has never been easy gaining a place in university in Singapore. Competition is keen for limited places and the way admission criteria is weighed, you either have to be an A/B student or a mediocre one to be safely in. Anything in-between or outside the law of averages becomes consideration for studying abroad.

This is at great cost to individuals other than parents, who mainly foot the hefty tuition and living expenses. It is also costly for this little island in the form of a constant brain drain.

For those of us who went through the local mill and lived to photostat the diploma for job applications, the current spotlight on the strictness of university-admission criteria is not so much timely as hopeful. It's still tough but some serious questions are being raised so there's a light ahead.

For starters: Why do students who do not win a university place here go on to do brilliantly in creditable universities abroad?

How is it these universities are prepared to admit them when Singapore ones won't? What is it in the admissions criteria that misses the clues to a student's genuine abilities?

I look back on my A-level grades and remember what a miserable time I had gaining them. A combination of hospitalisation and a limited choice of subjects during A levels resulted in the kind of grades that might have been borderline for admissions except for a distinction here and there.

I still believe it was an incredibly lucky year for me when I gained a place at the University of Singapore without having to explain how much school I missed.

The exams were a system to be beaten, mainly through the ploy known as "spotting questions". This meant you second-guessed the examiners and studied only for those questions you thought might be asked.

If you hit jackpot, no one need ever know just how shaky your tertiary training on any subject might be.

Some might argue that "spotting" exam questions correctly is a skill. Whatever it is, it doesn't add up to a proper education since most of the effort is spent narrowing one's focus on particular topics to the serious detriment of the whole picture.

But loads of Singapore students prosper on this technique to achieve respectable exam grades. But are they educated in the way we mean when we speak about the intellectual and professional grooming tertiary education should offer?

If you ask me what I remember from (sort of) studying for all those exams, I'd have to say I honestly cannot remember a thing. I only remember with pleasure the subjects I loved and exams didn't come into the equation when I read for them.

What I did with the subjects I loved were my education -- the wide reading, the research, the professional resourcing on related matters. These were external to exams.

Because of Singapore's emphasis on exams, the average student tends to treat them as an exercise quite separate from being educated -- it is very possible to be good at answering questions enough to squeak through exams without actually learning anything genuine.

University education is more available now than it used to be, and there are certainly more options open to students. But the rationale for what tertiary education must achieve has not moved very far from when I sat in large lecture theatres trying to learn but concluding that to complete the workload demanded, I would have to cram. Cram first to pass the exam, learn later.

Much later, when I left to study in the US, I collided with the amazing universe of subject choice spread out like a feast for the average American undergraduate at university.

What marvelous options, so many electives -- the bizarre and wonderful opportunity to combine three graduate units of Modern Economic Theory and a credit of Outdoor Survival Training. Or Calculus and Frisbee 101. Or American Literature and Introduction To Nuclear Physics.

It was only then that I realised I never really had an undergraduate experience, I was perhaps, too busy being stuffed with a large amount of fixed and mandatory knowledge, not much of it fully absorbed.

This was made especially clear to me when I considered a doctoral programme and realised that my Singapore undergraduate curriculum was so wide, it had covered most of the reading ground for doctoral students in my subject area.

While I had astonishing breadth, I lacked depth in anything. And in some areas, I was far too specialised to develop a complementary curriculum on my own. When you consider that I was an Arts student, this was rather curious. The brain was like a log-jam.

Okay, so maybe it was just my limited brain. Our obsession with exam grades and the value we place on them -- as students, teachers, school principals, university graduates, lecturers and employers -- is long overdue for psychotherapy. Very few tools in life are absolute in the measure of the human potential to excel, and certainly exam results cannot be the only measure.

It doesn't follow that straight As in a quantitative curriculum add up to abilities that will make brilliant and inspiring Prime Ministers, or pioneering medical researchers, or managers and business leaders of exceptional vision.