this article made me think about you overseas ppl.

ST Forum Jan 10, 2006
'EXAM MERITOCRACY' VERSUS 'TALENT MERITOCRACY'
Why top S'pore students aren't world beaters

I REFER to the article, 'There is no textbook formula' (ST, Jan 6), by Fareed Zakaria in which comparison was made between the education systems of the United States and Singapore and how although Singapore students top global science and maths rankings regularly, they do not become world beaters 10 or 20 years later.

Very few of them actually become 'truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics'.

Singapore's Minister of Education, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, admits that 'ours is an exam meritocracy' as opposed to America's 'talent meritocracy' and that America's 'culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority', is not prevalent in our system.

A fact widely known in the scholar community is that Singapore's top junior colleges have had, for the past years, among the highest percentage of successful applicants to America's Ivy League universities (from any high school worldwide) and most graduate among the top of their cohorts in these elite colleges.

The questions that need to be asked - and answered - would be, So what happened? How do we make these top-ranked students go on to be top-ranked adults in their chosen vocations?

Does the fact that scholarship-awarding bodies like the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's insistence on a Grade Point Average of 3.8 (equivalent to first-class honours) before students will be considered for overseas PhD studies not send the signal that the '3.8' is all that matters, to the exclusion of all else?

Our students then take the cue from there and I would be most surprised if the scholarship holders chose challenging courses - and professors - en route to their '3.8'. My gut feeling tells me that most would choose safe courses, perhaps even living in virtual Singapore 'scholar' communities in preparation for tests/exams.

Most would, of course, prove our minister correct that they are 'exam-smart' and have their magical figure of '3.8'.

I would have thought that as these are already students of 'proven' record, that it would be beneficial to allow them to explore the width and depth of their human capacity by setting less onerous standards.

They will then better benefit from their overseas education and may even learn to take 'risks'. For example, the bio-medical scholarship holder may then sign up for Anthropology or the budding engineer, Political Science, etc.

Our scholar students will then 'have a life', like the rest of the undergraduates.

Most of these students are government-sponsored, with planned and ingrained 'fast-track' career paths. The tendency might be for them to think that they have got a 'great thing' going for them and that it would be most stupid and counter-intuitive to 'rock the boat' by initiating change. But change there must be if we are looking for 'world-beaters'!

The organisations in which these scholars work have their work cut up for them as they try to prevent the obviously talented 'returned scholar' from becoming just another mediocre corporate 'climber'.

Dr Huang Shoou Chyuan