e pur si muove

this part is a giant parenthetical retelling of anecdotes of an ex-classmate, who neatly illustrates the asocial aspects of selection pressure due to the examination culture.

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- part iii -

thoughtlessness is the primogenitor of many an accident, as one of my ex-classmates has happily demonstrated time and time again to us long-suffering classmates. this guy, a fellow chemistry major, goes into lab each time and acts as though he had absolutely no clue what he should be going, even though he has the pre-lab already done. he would do every single lab by watching what other people did, then do his monkey-see-monkey-do routine.

if he decided to monkey me for one particular lab session, he would do one thing, walk over to me, then ask, “i did this. then how ah?” then if i was in a good mood i would humor him, whence he would return to his bench space and do the next step and repeat the cycle until the end of lab. if not, he would just hang around watching me do the lab until a teaching assistant (ta) would come around and ask what he was doing, and shoo him back to his bench space.

of course, he got into all sorts of hilarious trouble. a memorable incident was when he did his whole monkeying routine on me on a titration (yes, he acts as if he has no idea how to do one!) and he copied what i was doing step by step until the part where i added phenolphthalein to the acidic aliquot to be titrated. he missed that step completely and happily started titrating, and then wondered why he could not get the endpoint despite using up all the titrant! (for those of you who are rusty in chemistry, phenolphthalein is an indicator which is colorless in acidic solutions and bright pink in basic solutions.)

my favorite episode was when he borrowed a plastic ruler (the acrylamide kind that is half transparent and half white) from a fellow singaporean in organic chemistry lab to draw some pencil lines. he later found out that the ruler was stained with some chemical and happily rinsed it with acetone to wash it off. imagine the stunned look on his face when the ruler started dissolving in his hands! panicking, he chucked the melting ruler back into the owner’s pencil box, in which a melted mess was discovered by the irate owner half an hour later.

a simpler episode but just as funny was when he inverted a separatory funnel to shake up the mixture but didn’t cap the funnel before inverting it. and all he did was to stare at the growing mess on the bench as the liquid kept flowing out of the funnel that he was still holding in one hand! a bemused teaching assistant who saw the whole thing then said wryly, “looks like i’ll need to teach you the technique of bench-top extraction”, which basically involved wiping up the entire mess with paper towels and subsequent washings with solvent of said
towels.

it’s pretty clear that this guy hasn’t the faintest clue what chemistry is about. yet he manages to score pretty well on tests since he happens to be one of the most kiasu people that i have ever met. he is the kind that will call me up every single time a homework assignment or test was returned, to ask “how many marks did you get ar?” like seriously, does it matter? and “ha, ha, i got half a mark more than you!” or “how come you got one mark more than me? how ar, how ar?” is simply childish. like that is going to be statistically significant at all.

km has the most annoying habit of looking over my shoulder every time i note down something in lecture, and trying to figure out what exactly i wrote down, and even bugging me in the middle of lecture as to what some of my symbols mean! of course, he wouldn’t even dream of reciprocating if i asked to borrow his notes.

but by far the most disgusting episode that involves him was this one time in organic lab when he threw away his product in the second week of our final experiment, which was a three-week-long synthesis experiment. (he was doing a solvent extraction and poured away the wrong layer, something the tas drum into us never ever to do.) the course has a policy that if you ask for more starting material, you get 25% off, so he being ultra-kiasu would do anything to avoid that penalty. so he went around begging for material from the rest of the students. most of us just ignored him, but a sympathetic classmate (call her B) donated half of her sample to him to let him continue the lab.

the next week B messed up her experiment, and wanted to get some material back from km to continue the experiment, but he refused to part with any of his precious sample because he had ‘lost too many marks already’ so he ‘can’t afford to give you back any (sic)’. so poor B had to ask for more starting material to restart, so she suffered the restart penalty. on top of that, she had to stay overtime to complete the experiment (imagine trying to cram a three-session practical into two-thirds of a session’s worth of time) and hence also suffered a penalty for overstaying. (yes the teacher is anal!)

ok, so the morals and ethics of the preceding situation were ambiguous. but get this: he got all depressed over messing up the lab and fretted so much over his potentially ‘ruined’ grade. B, despite being the weaker student, ended up comforting him over the missed opportunity and told him that ‘it’s not important. grades aren’t everything’ and not to let it get to him too much. she also confided that she wasn’t confident of doing well because she had already messed up too many other experiments. turned out that she got a ‘c’ for the class, which she was kinda upset about but thought it was still liveable.

then she ran in to km one day and she asked him how he did overall. and the cheeky bastard
just said ‘oh, it’s not important. grades aren’t everything!’ later on
i wormed it out of him that he got an a. bloody hell. guess why
everyone shunned him after that semester.

based on what i’ve argued above, i don’t really blame him for being socially dysfunctional. it’s more a sad reflection of what intense kiasuism can do to a person and have one’s moral framework totally derailed in mindless pursuit of an optimal examination score.

- end of part iii -

this part is a subrant on the psychosocial effects of examinations and the pressure it exerts on students.

- part ii -

in singapore, where social engineering has long been an important feature of our society, the effects of engineers’ fixations on metrics, manifests itself in many social settings. let’s just focus on the effect of the paramount importance of examination scores has on students. keep in mind, again, that today’s students are tomorrow’s citizens. most visible and most obvious is the relatively high proportion of student suicides over failure to achieve desired examination scores. (japan is another country that comes to mind.) and the many documented cases of examination anxiety precipitating mental breakdowns. (not widely publicized, but ask around. some teachers in particular love to gossip about these things.) and how many untold students work themselves up into a frenzy during examination season, falling sick, experiencing weight fluctuations, snapping at their unwary family members?

there is of course, a more light-hearted side to all this. many of the fluxes that occur in social traffic can be traced back to the examination culture. attendance at golden villages drops significantly in september, and resurge in december. walking along orchard road in june is an exercise in squeezing your way through a human sea like a piece of flotsam. and you can forget about finding a seat at starbucks or mcdonald’s in may without having to fight your way through a sea of textbooks, worksheets, pencil cases and bookbag decorations, punctuated by the obligatory drink that “rents” the table for the next few donkey hours and preventing paying, high-turnover yuppies from frequenting their stores. no wonder frustrated store managers downtown chase students away, like unwanted crows.

only recently has the ministry of education finally realized that academic achievement is not everything, and has set up experimental schools focusing on mathematics/science and sports, respectively. well, at least it’s a step in the right direction. however, the splicing of such ‘radical’ thought with the entire system leads to ridiculous things such as forcing the sports school students to be at least of express stream standard. on one hand, they want to cultivate sports talents, but yet they can’t quite bear to decouple sports aptitude from academic achievement, their sacred cow which they love to milk for results. *sigh* well, at least they seem to be trying.

the survival tactics of mugging and kiasuism to cope with the selection pressure of academic examinations have opened up new epochs in the annals of idiocy and rudeness. mugging for an education, or what my ex-chinese teacher fondly calls 填鸭式的教育, places paramount value on factual recall, and on precious little emphasis on conceptual understanding. this is completely against the grain of both sciences and humanities, where critical thinking is the key that unlocks the world to the mind. and although a good memory is a valuable asset, critical thinking that is the real skill that should be imparted on students, because it is one that becomes applicable to every aspect of life. of course, it could be argued (darkly) that in the current conformist climate, an unthinking populace that plays follow-the-leader 24/7 is the ideal state for a meritocracy, in which case that explains the massive hemorrhage of intelligentsia in the last two decades whom must have felt that ‘their intelligence was insulted’. (what a nice singlish-ism!)

let me discuss science in particular, and the abysmal way lab sessions are run in singapore. while both emerged from a philosophy of understanding based on factual discourse, science also defines clearly the supreme role of arbiter: to let the natural world decide which hypotheses are correct and which are wrong is the fundamental philosophy of science. that’s why laboratory sessions are an important part of a proper education in the sciences. but the way we teach labs are pitiful – they are presented as things that people have to do, fixed protocols to memorize and swallow, no need to think in lab, just do. lab time is valuable – professionals and trainees alike both suffer from not having time to think in lab. when wilheim röntgen was asked to comment on what he thought of x-rays when he discovered them, he reportedly retorted: “i didn’t think. i experimented.” while this illustrates neatly the application of empiricism, this does not mean that thought is not needed to the process of scientific discovery and criticism.

- end of part ii

‘there are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. and i am unsure about the universe.’ - albert einstein

i am writing this in my biochemistry class because i realize that i would be really bored then. turns out that i was right. so let me rant (long and hard) about meritocracy, particularly as it is practiced in singapore. ranting is addictive, especially since it’s always about something one feels particularly passionate about. so let me present to you the thesis that meritocracy, especially the way it is practiced in singapore and much of the world, is an unsustainable proposition. if this is a sacred cow to you, go away, you’ve just demonstrated one of those inconceivable infinities.

the entire rant turned out to be horrendously long, so i’ve broken it up into more manageable subtopical pieces. hopefully you will find time to read it all. this piece is on the relationship between exams and meritocracy.

- part i -

let’s put it this way: meritocracy is a farce, and is an impossible ideal as it stands today. why? the basic premise is sound enough: reward the most meritorious, and promote them to leadership positions in a society/organization. in principle, it certainly seems superior to other means of leadership selection; such as aristocracy, where such taboo phenomena such as nepotism may occur; or democracy, where the tyranny of the majority prevails. the unwashed masses are stupid by definition, since by definition the massive populace are below average on average, as compared to the meritocrats who are by definition above average on average. (mull over it for a while, it will make sense). heaven forbid that idiots rule the country! that’s why we need to divide and conquer, to herd in the random hordes of blithering idiots lest they trip up and vote for unworthy opposition politicians!

the delicious irony of meritocracy - its achilles’ heel, if you will - is that the definition of a meritocracy conveniently sidesteps the issue of judging precisely who is meritorious. how does one define merit? in singapore’s context, the answer is clear: scores on standardized examinations. first psle and gce ‘o’ levels, then primary 4 streaming examinations (intermittently) and gce ‘a’ levels, and then most recently some experimentation with sats. why waste time thinking about such woolly things like merit when one can have a nice quantifiable measure? such is the engineer’s worldview, and a most dangerous one too. “engineers design by the numbers, and that’s the problem.” tackle a problem by defining metrics, work out some target number, and hit that number using any means possible. who cares how it works, as long as it does. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

the examinations process in singapore is an unforgiving system, because one’s performance on specific exams at specific points in time make or break one’s future, and for life. high scores open doors; low scores slam them wide shut. a spell of sickness can impair your ability to regurgitate and therefore doom your entire future; a lack of aptitude in a compulsory subject compels one to mediocrity for life; forgetting to bring a calculator to your maths ‘d’ examination spells instant failure because everyone else does so well on it. i am sure that many more such anecdotes abound. the ‘o’ level maths ‘d’ exam is my favorite example of an exam which utterly fails to discriminate between good and bad students, because the score tells you basically how many careless mistakes you’ve made on that one exam, and not how well you ‘know’ the material. so basically the signal-to-noise on a maths ‘d’ score is so low as to be practically useless.

most importantly, examinations are doing their jobs less and less efficiently nowadays. ‘a’s on gce exams used to be prized rarities in our parents’ generation; today’s top students count the number of ‘a’s on their (near-)perfect transcripts. how much of it can be attributed to a genuine increase in scholastic ability across the board? and how much to grade inflation, the specter of increased expectations of those who fund of examination authorities? how much can be attributed to the convergence of the “learning the exam” strategy? if a student is able to do all the problems in the chemistry ten year series (extra credit if s/he used a copy without detailed solutions, unlike the infamous red-spot series), does that mean that s/he understands chemistry? and how about measurement uncertainty and resolution issues? is a student with 9 ‘a’s really that much worse that a student with 10 ‘a’s? how about a 9 ‘a’ student v. a 9 ‘a’ 1 ‘b’ student? how large an exam score difference does one need to attain statistically meaningful results? there is a whole panoply of issues pertaining to measurements using examinations, all of which have yet to be addressed in the public eye.

most worryingly, the phenomenon of examination-based testing cultivates the mentality that the knowledge that a subject represents should be neatly delineated into “need-to-know” and not. how many times have you as a student heard the refrain “this is not in your syllabus?” course syllabi are by definition a canon of standard facts and knowledge in a specific field, i.e. things that have been researched to death, and are as dry as bitter winter snow. all the interesting stuff, the frontiers of research, theses that ignite passions, takes place outside students’ syllabi by definition. what surer way to kill interest in a subject than to sigh wearily: “aiyah, outside your syllabus lah, donch worry!”? why teachers do this is, of course, would make an interesting exposé into the harried lives of our educators, but at any rate outside the scope of this rant.

what does all this translate into for our current students, our citizens of tomorrow? kiasuism, general apathy for all pre-university subjects, chow mugging, regurgitation without understanding, learning the exam not the subject — do any of these sound familiar? are these really the kind of values that we want to instill in our future generations, that a gauche mix of machiavellian goal-oriented tactics and chinese water-torture-like method of storing information is the way to succeed in life? that collecting awards is more important than the process or accomplishments for which that award was given? can we really blame the twisted products of the system for what it has done to them?

the notion that a person’s merit can be boiled down to a single number, a composite score from specific tests at specific points in one’s life, that such is the only worthy measure of intelligence - as it manifests itself in academic performance - is ludicrous at best. i am not sure about universities elsewhere, but american universities have definitely long acknowledged the limitations of standardized testing. not that american universities are faultless, but it’s one thing that they are doing right. the recent brouhaha over the entire university of california deciding to drop sat scores as an admissions requirement is an illuminating point in case. that’s the reason behind the essay questions; and for graduate school, research track record, and letters of recommendations. the more diverse sources of information, the better: many sources of information reduce the dependency on any one single measure and therefore the inherent flaws of each measure give a smaller distortion to the picture of the student that it is trying to portray.

- end of part i