Originally posted by Dolce Vita:
heyhey, not all students are lousy people. if you said that you are actually insulting the entire Singapore population and besides, all your words can be summarised into: singapore practices meritocracy. grades do matter anywhere, seriously.
without the people from the good schools, graduating with top grades, and who are highly skilled, there would be no singapore. singapore would still be a fishing village.
I would suggest you read my post carefully. Since when did I say grade do not matter at all? I never did. What I questioned is the systems tendency to produce students who are exam-smart but knowledge-stupid. If a straight A student who can't pick out Singapore from a map of SE Asia nevermind the world, or tell you when Singapore became independent, simply because they didn't take history in Sec 3/4, are they really smart? Or simply exam-smart? There is a difference you know
What I questioned was the over-reliance on using exams to determine grades, and thus someone's "so called" intelligence. While I do accept that exams are the most cost-effective way to judge achievement, my problem is that I feel exams should not be the be-all and end-all of evaluating a person's eduacation. By doing so the system will only produce a whole lot of graduates who are good a mugging books by the truckload, regurgitating the facts they've mugged from the books at the exam hall without ever understanding the material they learnt.
Meritocracy is a system where a person who deserves to be ahead is ahead, regardless of anything else. I've known lots of so-called top engineers who bagged first class honours who couldn't tell a screwdriver from a spanner, but are where they are because they're good at the "regurgitiation technique" mentioned above. Is that meritocracy?
Which is why I applaud the governments attempts to "remake Singapore", and change the education system into giving a more rounded education rather than just focusing on grades . But I fear this change will not happen overnight as the mindset that "Grades are everything" is already too ingrained in the Singaporean psyche.