A change of pace: Promoting another blog!

I decided for this post that I'd do something a little different.

You'll still get to enjoy reading my writing but on a different blog!

No, I don't have another blog. I wrote a review on the Water Chatter blog last year, and I want to share it with you.

Water Chatter is a blog run by PUB, the national water agency.

In this post, I got my hands on a copy of "A Day in the Life of Water Wally", a gamebook by an intern from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at the Nanyang Technological University.

Did I like it? Click here to find out: https://waterchatter.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/impressions-of-a-day-in-the-life-of-water-wally/


Enjoy!

Food in the 'hood: Favourite eats at the National University of Singapore

University can be stressful. Fortunately, there's no shortage of good food in NUS to indulge in and put the world to rights.

I've only been in NUS for one semester and tend to only stick around the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and University Town so I probably have tried only a fraction of what the campus has to offer. Nonetheless, here are my top picks based on what I've sampled so far.

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences - The Deck

Western food

I'm not a big eater so the spaghetti arrabbiata ($2) is a good option for me. The portion size is decent for the price and the taste is passable too. For those with bigger appetites, add $1 for chicken slices. The spaghetti bolognese ($2.50) is also very worth the money because the cook isn't stingy with the minced beef. If you're a meat lover, this stall sells steaks and lamb chops, together with various other fish dishes.

Sin Kee Chicken Rice

If the name rings a bell, it's probably because you've heard of its parent franchise, Sin Kee Famous Chicken Rice, which has a few branches around Singapore such as at Holland Drive and Havelock Road. This stall is descended from noble stock, and it doesn't disappoint. The rice is tasty enough to eat on its own, and the chicken is tender and has a robust flavour. Unfortunately, the chilli sauce is watery and one-dimensional. But for $2.20, this is as good a chicken rice as can be reasonably expected in a canteen.

Drinks

Well, tea and fruit juice are technically not "eats", but these two stalls, located side-by-side, deserve a special mention for selling their drinks so cheaply without compromising on quality. A small cup of milk tea costs $0.60 and a large one costs $0.80. The tea is sweet and creamy, which is the way I like it. A refreshing cup of freshly made apple juice costs $1.50.

University Town - FoodClique

"Gulai" rice with chicken

The Indonesian stall offers chicken and fish cooked in a wide range of styles like smashed and deep fried ("penyet") or barbequed ("panggang"). My personal favourite is the "gulai", in which a whole chicken leg is steamed until it's juicy and falling off the bone, then served with rice and thick and delicious curry. This dish costs $4.50, but other dishes can be more expensive depending on the ingredients used and the amount of labour required to prepare them.

Zhajiangmian

Sold by the China noodles stall, this zhajiangmian is a delightful heap of slightly spicy noodles topped with plenty of mincemeat and cucumber strips, making for an interesting mouthfeel which keeps me coming back for more.

As I explore more of NUS, I'm sure I'll discover even more food gems!

Course restructuring: Amputating psychology

Not my finest title for a post but whatever.

I was disturbed when I discovered that Temasek Poly overhauled its curriculum recently and made a lot of changes to the psychology programme I came from that I don't agree with.

With a misty look in my eye, I say, "It was better during my time."

When I was there, we had a requirement called Cross-Disciplinary Subjects (CDS) in which we had to take three modules which were unrelated to our diploma. In NUS, we have something similar known as Unrestricted Electives.

Apparently, CDS is no more. It has been replaced by a strengthened TP Fundamentals component. We had this Fundamentals bit too, but it wasn't called Fundamentals then. It was known as TP Core.

Semantics, semantics.

Last time, TP Core taught us things like public speaking, academic writing, and professional communication skills. And we had the dreaded Leadership: Essential Attributes and Practice (LEAP) levels one through three, of course.

But now, they have all these shiny new modules such as Career Readiness (hey, Roots & Wings!), which is split into three separate modules numbered one through three just like LEAP, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Persuasive Communication (I wonder if they cover Pathos, Ethos, and Logos...), Communication & Information Literacy (fake news?), Sports & Wellness, Current Issues & Critical Thinking, and Global Studies.

And students have to choose one of three modules with these highfalutin names: Managing Diversity at Work, Global Citizenship & Community Development, or Expressions of Culture. (Shoutout to States Times Review, who may want to turn this into a story with the headline: "Polytechnic Brainwashing Students into Accepting Influx of Foreigners".)

By getting rid of CDS, the institution has severely hampered students' freedom to explore areas that they have interest in. Previously, we could select which CDS we wanted to take, so we would generally go for things that we felt we might like. That was how I first got to study English phonetics, which helped me a lot when I took a basic English module in NUS.

Now, students have very little choice. Everything in TP Fundamentals is fixed except for the decision on which of the highfalutin "cultural" modules I mentioned above to opt for.

Coming from a university and faculty system which gives me so much leeway to "build my own degree", such restrictiveness is anathema to me.

At least there's still LEAP, which is probably the most useful module in the entire Singapore tertiary education system. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

But what really shocked me was the total deletion of the subject Physiological Psychology from the Diploma Core part of the psychology programme.

Although I don't major in Psychology in NUS, I know for a fact that psychology majors must complete the following Essential modules: Biological Psychology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Abnormal Psychology. These represent the five pillars of psychology upon which the whole discipline rests.

So to remove Physiological Psychology (another name for Biological Psychology) from the syllabus is like cutting off one of the legs that psychology stands on, hence the title of this post.

The problem with biological psychology is that it's a bitter pill: you suffer a lot when you have to study it because of all the memorising involved in remembering the names and functions of the various structures in the brain and nervous system, but in the long term it benefits you greatly because you know many facts and understand stuff about the human body that most people will never even imagine. When I did the basic Psychology module in NUS, I sure was glad for having taken Physiological Psychology before!

I think future cohorts of students graduating from the psychology diploma will be poorer for this, because it means they won't have as much of a headstart in their psychology degree courses compared to their peers from junior college or other diploma programmes.

To make matters worse, Abnormal Psychology, another of psychology's "legs", was made a Diploma Elective where it was previously a Diploma Core subject. This means that only students who choose to study it will take the module.

I'm struggling to comprehend it! When there's justification to make things compulsory, they make it optional. But in other parts of the programme like TP Fundamentals, they are so heavy-handed in dictating what students should take.

Couldn't they have left well enough alone? Haven't they heard the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

Reading reaction: NUS applicants to get bonus points for 1st-choice courses

I was a little perturbed after reading this Straits Times report (the link leads to a Google cache to circumvent paywalls) in which the NUS Provost announced several new initiatives.

There are two main reasons why I felt disturbed.

Firstly, and I quote the fifth paragraph of the news report:

"Let's say one student with 81 points applies for communications as his first choice, and another with 82 points applies to the same course as his second choice. With the 1.25 points, the student who lists the course as his first choice will get ahead of the person with 82 points," he said.

This is a flawed example because one does not apply for "communications" at the admissions exercise. "Communications" is a major within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Prospective undergraduates vie for entry into the Faculty, not into specific majors. Becoming a major in "communications" only happens after the first semester as an actual undergraduate at the university.

I should know, given that "communications", which is called Communications and New Media in full, is my major.

Similarly, it would be inaccurate to use psychology, economics, history or geography in this example. He could have used accountancy as an example instead, because school leavers can apply directly into that programme.

It might seem like a small matter. After all, it was merely an example given in passing to reporters at a press conference. But it shows a concerning lack of understanding by the higher-ups of how the systems work on the ground. Worse still, it shows that the people working in the NUS communications department did not get their facts straight before preparing the brief for the Provost.

And it could mislead and confuse people. Imagine if an A level holder is interested in doing "communications" at NUS. If she reads the news report, she might get the impression that she can "apply for communications as her first choice", only to be stymied by the electronic application form which lists no such thing as "communications" anywhere, first choice or otherwise. She would not know that she has to choose the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences option first, then wait until she is actually in the Faculty and has completed one semester before choosing to major in Communications and New Media.

Or maybe she did have the right idea from her prior knowledge of the NUS admissions process. Perhaps she heard from her seniors how the process actually works. But after reading what the Provost said, the waters become muddied and she begins to have doubts. "Maybe my seniors were mistaken," she might think. "Or maybe I misinterpreted them. The Provost must know what he is talking about, after all."

The second reason I was uneasy was that the logic of the move confounded me. Quoting from the sixth and seventh paragraphs:

On why NUS decided on the move, he said: "If you have done well and are passionate about a career in business or computing, for example, then we want to say to you that we support your passion."

"We want to help you pursue your passion," he said, adding that students passionate about what they study tend to perform better.

How does putting something as first choice in a university application form equate to being passionate in that thing? It seems like simplistic thinking to me.

In research, they have this concept called construct validity. A construct is essentially an abstract idea that cannot be measured directly, like love, attitude, aggression, and passion. Yes, passion. You cannot take a measuring tape or a weighing scale to measure these things.

So researchers develop ways to measure them, such as through questionnaires. Many of us have taken some kind of personality test before. Personality is the construct those tests are trying to measure.

Validity refers to how well the measuring instrument is doing at actually measuring the thing it is supposed to be measuring. You cannot use a ruler and claim to be weighing an object because your measurement would not be valid.

Putting it all together, construct validity basically asks the question: "Is this way of measuring X truly measuring X?"

Is what people put as their first choice really a reflection of their passion for that subject?

Or might other factors influence what they put as their first choice? Money, for instance?

With the advent of the digital disruption/future economy/artificial intelligence/big data, I would not be surprised if more and more people start filling in "Computing" as their first choice to try to get their foot in the door of this lucrative industry.

This does not mean that suddenly there are so many people who are passionate about computing, does it?

It is dangerous to assume so, because it could lead to undesirable consequences. For example, some of these so-called passionate students could find that they cannot make it in the field that they chose. Maybe they struggle to understand the course content, or maybe they are just not interested. They realise too late that they have made the wrong choice. Either they drop out and start from scratch in some other pursuit, or they struggle through to the bitter end and graduate with grades unbecoming of one supposedly passionate about the area of study.

When I verbalised my opinions to a couple of close relations I was advised not to air them in case I am marked for retribution by the university. I would like to think that the university is not like that. The university encourages critical thinking and open discussion and honest feedback from all stakeholders. After all, this is what sets tertiary education apart from primary and secondary schooling. We must have thoughts of our own now, not canned answers that we regurgitate. And if the unspeakable happens after this post goes live, that would simply prove something about the university that would not exactly cover it in glory.

So, no fear. I will be alright.