2.30am - rambling time. I slept so much today (or rather over the entire weekend), it was wonderful! We recently described our lifestyle here as the type of life w wish we could live back home but that's impossible at NUS. It's pretty awful in the way that it's created such slackers out of us that goodness knows how we'll re-adapt when we go back to NUS...
Here, whatever we touch seems to turn into gold. Something like minimal effort, maximum results?
Everyone (of my NUS friends) has some story about how all they practically did was turn up and they aced that assignment or test; in less than half the time the rest of the class took. Of course, grade inflation's a problem here too - there's no bell-curve, and over 90s aka As seem to be given out pretty liberally. The "mid-term period" is spread out over a few weeks such that it doesn't even feel like a test period at all (except maybe for that 30-hour block when 3 of my mid-terms fell on the same day and i studied for the test literally in the time between tests kinda thing). Instructors are more than willing to grade you up - they say they're more interested in you learning the course materials than in your exam-taking abilities, and they show it... Many give out the exam questions (eg. 2 out of this list of 20 questions will come out) or provide comprehensive review sheets containing all the topics / concepts you will need to know for the test. So basically if you cover the material, you got it.. No tricky stuff.
Ahh so wonderful. Studying here gives me the luxury of doing readings leisurely and working on assignments less stressfully, because the weightage for each is generally lower, with a focus on continuous assessment rather than NUS's final exam - centric style.
Speaking of NUS final exam system, i realize that after all the work we put in on our notes and studying the material (all semester-long worth of it, ie. cramming info. rather than really engaging with the material), the professors can very well not read a single 1 of our papers (partly due to the illegibility of many of our scripts i suppose) and just give us final grades according to how we've already been doing in class or how we did in the mid-term or whatever they want, really (abritary much?). I mean the fact is, many professors are here not so much cos of the teaching and more to do their own research with the university's backing. So if one was a prof. lacking in scruples, and their students' exam scripts are messy and almost illegible, or the deadline for handing in final grades was coming up and they got their own research to do (which they're more interested and vested in than in teaching those undergraduate brats), they could just do a shoddy job on marking the scripts and grading the students. AND no one would know better, since we don't receive our exam scripts back (sometimes we don't even receive our essays back) or any feedback on them or anything at all really, except for a letter grade and their accompanying cap-pushing/killing digits.
How's that for transparency.
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