CS3216

{Essay} Why Grades?

Do grades matter as much as our parents say they do?

One thing we know for sure is that grades are important. Our parents reward us when we ace exams, and so we have been conditioned to think that scoring As in school are important achievements worthy of our time. And for the most part, this is true: the approval of our peers and our parents and our teachers depend largely on our grades. So grades do matter. But there's an interesting assumption to examine here: why do grades matter so much? Are they still as important now as they were 50 years ago? And perhaps - more pressingly - why do so many of us accept grades as the de facto indicator of ability, without ever questioning the underlying logic of our grading systems?

I've been thinking about these questions for some time now, and I think I've come to some reasonable conclusions about them. My contention is that grades are no longer as important as they once were, and the implications from this idea are rather exciting, and scary, both at once.

Where Exams Come From
Exams and grades are relatively new things to the human experience. It wasn't until the industrial age that schools - and by extension exams - became commonplace.

The first society to implement examinations were the Chinese. Beginning with the Sui dynasty, candidates from all over China would gather to take the Imperial examinations, held once a year, every year, in order to gain entrance to the state bureaucracy.

There are two important things about exams that we must recognize began with the Chinese Imperial examinations.

The first is that the Chinese examinations served as a filter for the Imperial government. They made no pretense to be anything otherwise. And to this day exams still do act as filters: there are only so many jobs in companies and governments, and so therefore there must be a way of separating the good from the bad, the capable from the uncapable. Exams are that 'way', and they serve exactly that purpose.

The second thing may surprise you, and it is this: what the Imperialist Examinations focused on were Confucian classics. You may wonder at that, and rightly so: what does a study of the classics have to do with state management? And the truthful answer is ... well, not much. Apparently the Chinese government thought very highly of it - they considered learning the classics to be a good sign of intelligence, and if you excelled at it then you must certainly be clever enough to manage a state on your own.

Was that a valid idea? I think there's something to it - the British colonialists had a remarkably similar mentality. Do well in Latin, they say, and we'll give you a colony to rule over for us. And that worked out pretty well for them.

Where Exams Go Wrong
Those base assumptions that the Chinese Imperialists had are things that we've carried with us, even to this day. Exams are supposed to be good filters, and they are supposed to be indicative of our ability - even if 80% of what we study would never be used in our actual jobs.

But is this true?

If exams are good filters of society - how, then, do we explain the many people who do well in school, but not as well in life? And how are we to explain away the weird outliers that defy what we know of examinations - Steve Jobs, for instance, or Bill Gates, or Richard Branson? If exams are good filters, these outliers shouldn't have had happened in the first place. And if they really are good filters, everyone who scored good grades would be just as successful outside of school as they were in it.

We know that some straight-A students make for terrible employees; why is that so?

Perhaps a better question to ask is this: what exactly is it that grades measure? If exams are a filter for weeding out the good from the poor, then surely there must be something that they measure that's so valuable to future employers. If you could figure that out, perhaps you'd be able to get more mileage from your examinations.

I suspect Paul Graham has the best answer to that question: grades measure future performance. Employers are interested in future performance. They can't test everyone themselves, by putting people in the job one by one until they find the best guy, and so they rely on the next best thing - grades.

But the problem with grades is that grades aren't always a good indicator of future performance. In fact, they can sometimes be particularly bad. Grades are the results of exams; exams are a filtering system for future performance, and so therefore exams - being a system, like all systems - can be hacked.

How can exams be hacked? By its very nature, exams are particularly susceptible to people who are good at ... well, exams. In Malaysia, scoring well in exams is usually a direct function of one's ability to absorb certain facts in order to vomit them out later onto a test paper. If a student gained the skill to do exactly that - he would do well for all his exams, regardless of whether the exam was history or chemistry or math. And, yes, you'd think this would be different for subjects like math or physics, where there's thinking involved, but you'd be surprised. I remember being shocked when I first came to NUS. My discrete math teacher was a Frenchman, and the math he taught required creativity - something I had never experienced before. It was amazing and beautiful to see that coming out from a high-level math textbook, and also rather scary; scary because it wasn't particularly hackable.

Is it really a problem that grades are not good indicators of future performance? The answer to that is yes, it is - because it is no longer universally true that grades are the 'next best thing' for measuring performance. Grades were never a good indicator to start off with, and they are beginning to seem obsolete. What has changed?

The Decreasing Importance Of Grades
It would be wrong to say that companies have wised up to the inaccuracy of grades. For the large part, this change has been due to a shift in economics as opposed to a conscious, calculated decision by market leaders.

The global economy today favours smaller companies over big ones. There are many reasons for this, but the basic tenets are obvious: due to globalization and cheaper logistics, it now makes more sense for companies to outsource some tasks in order to stay focused on their core competencies. This has been a relatively new phenomenon. Never before has a smaller company been able to take on a bigger company - and win. If you don't believe me, consider: in the past, railways would purchase steel refineries to manufacture the steel required for their operations; today, it outsources such operations to external - often international - companies. And this is but one example, in what is a remarkably outdated industry. The effects are far stronger and more powerful in technological companies. But, bearing these differences, what does this mean for grades?

It turns out that it is easier to measure performance in a small company, as opposed to a big one. If you do well, the company does well; if you do badly, the company does badly. This is not so for large corporations. In a large corporation, individual performance cannot be easily measured, because the organization is so large that your individual contributions do not have a significant effect on the bottom line. Graham points out this is why grades have been so important to employers for the past few decades. The harder it is to measure individual performance, the more important it becomes to predict it. And because the economy has been dominated by large corporations for the past few decades, it used to mean everything to do well in exams.

But this is fast becoming history. Grades matter less when you can directly measure what they are made to predict - which is real performance. Why bother with an indicator when you can gauge the real thing? Larger corporations are adapting in order to enjoy the benefits of being small - Google, for instance, forms small teams of engineers to develop and test new products, and presumably gauges performance based on those smaller teams.

If this seems a little incredulous to you, consider: just 50 years ago it was enough to get good grades to get a good job to retire comfortably. This no longer holds true. Today, we are not only aware of people who have succeeded despite dropping out of college, but I have friends in NUS - in Singapore, even, a very exam-oriented country - who have either skipped college altogether, or who plan to drop out of school to do their own startups. And in big companies, there are now performance reviews, where before there were none. It used to be that seniority was all that mattered; young associates accepted a lower pay because they had to pay their dues, their times had yet to come.

It seems to be uncomfortably real that grades are beginning to decrease in importance. At the very least, they no longer hold the make-it-or-break-it quality they once had. And so, if this is true, the trend begs the question: what does this mean for our students?

An Exam-Oriented Paradox
One important thing we must remember is that for certain countries, the old model seems to hold true. In Japan and Korea, for instance, if you earned good grades, you are still able to score a stable, quality job in a salaried company. And to that end both countries have very competitive exam-oriented systems, and a high density of cram school to boot.

Would this state of affairs last forever? I doubt it. It turns out that smaller companies are also more efficient companies, and globalization cuts both ways. Sooner or later, the Korean and Japanese corporations would have to outsource their operations, and therefore split into smaller, independent units, if they are to keep up with more nimble competitors. And even if they refuse to do so, current economic forces make it feasible to start small companies, particularly those built around the Internet. While Asian countries currently enjoy the luxury of the sure grade and the stable job, it is something that may not last for much longer.

Unfortunately for us, however, the Asian model of education is still optimized for this old economic model. Malaysia isn't by far the only country with an exam-oriented society. There is nothing wrong with doing well in exams; it is when exams become the focus of a society's expectations that things begin to go wrong.

The problem with exams - particularly in Asian societies - is that the examination often becomes an ends onto itself. People say that the purpose of school is to learn new things that you may put to use good later in life, but this isn't true. What you're really going to school to learn - if you're in an Asian country - is to learn how to do well in exams.

There is a simple test for this: ask yourself if studying equals learning in high school. If it isn't, and you aren't doing much learning while you study, then there is a disconnect between the two. The truth is that schools spend a lot of time teaching us how to do well in exams. 50 years ago, this made a lot of sense, but today such time is better spent perfecting ideas that would come in handy in a performance-driven world.

In Malaysian high schools, for instance, we should stop pretending that the school is there to teach us good things. They are not. The Malaysian education system, from ages 6 - 19, is designed to teach you how to do well in exams. Learning math and science and all that jazz is secondary to that one core purpose. And this is - sadly - the truth of the matter; it is why we have tuition; it is also why we have shiny ads advertising 'exam-grade' pencils and erasers on television; all of it is what it means to live in an exam-oriented society.

Creativity
There is something that must be said here on creativity. For all the noise our education system makes about creative thinking, and critical thinking, their models of teaching such forms of thinking cannot be conceptually further away from the truth.

I began this essay by asking a series of interesting questions. I examined why grades mattered so much, why grades are so important to us, and why they may be irrelevant to a reasonable assessment of success in the real world. There is one question, however, that I have neglected to answer, and that is: why do so many of us accept grades as the de facto indicator of ability, without ever questioning the underlying logic of our grading systems? I believe this to be the most important question of them all.

One reason for this may be that we have been conditioned to think, since young, that grades are the be-all and end-all of our childhood existences. But there comes a point in time in which we are old enough and wise enough to challenge our own assumptions. So now the question: why do so few of us challenge this assumption in the first place?

I suspect the main reason for this is that we are taught, since young, not to think for ourselves. We don't hear that outright, of course. No teacher actually tells us not to think for ourselves. What they do tell us, however, that has the same net effect as telling us not to think, are things like "That's very good dear, but it's not what the examiners are looking for" or "That's not a proper exam answer". I suspect that each time our teachers tell our children that, they lose the ability to think laterally, to think critically, and so gradually they don't bother to think in terms of truth at all.

End
Grades are important as measures of cognitive ability. But do grades matter as much as our parents say they do? The truthful answer is that no, they don't, not anymore. Grades don't matter as much as real-world performance does, and as it becomes easier to measure performance directly, grades will matter less and less.

But is this an excuse, then, to score bad grades? The truthful answer is that I don't know. It probably depends. It is certainly a better use of your time to go out and build things, and learn things, as opposed to spending all that time learning to score well in exams - a skill with admittedly little real-world application. But on the flip side of that coin, grades - and by extension exams - are important elements in the learning processes of our education systems. It feels like a cop-out to take such a stance after 3000 words or so of argument, but this is the truth. Just be sure that you are studying for the sake of learning, and that exams are an indicator of that learning; and not the other way around.

Special thanks to Ida, Samantha, and aunty Constance for reading early drafts of this.

After The Midterms

Cross posted from my ifisnerdreturntrue blog:

24 hours after we first sat down to code in Sheares hall, I looked up and said: "I must blog about this."

"Ya, you should," Xialin said, and she looked up from her code for all of like 0.5634 seconds before looking back down at her computer screen. And I think that was the end of that conversation.

It could've been at 2 in the morning. Or 5am. Or maybe 7. Time kinda disappears when you've spent a whole night staring at monospaced fonts. I remember being hungry at around 2am. I also remember Biyan placing her head in her hands - I think I was plugging Haocong's backend into the UI then, and we both looked over at her and asked her if she was okay and she looked up and said she was thinking - but that might've been on Sunday night.

Like I said, I don't know. I can't remember. It's now all a big blur in my head.

What I do remember, however, is how much I've learnt from the Wave assignment.

What struck me the most about Wave was the sheer intensity with which Biyan and Haocong worked. I learned a lot from them. I can be very indisciplined - earlier on Saturday night I sat down to watch an animated video, putting off coding the UI, and Biyan said: "Cedric, I need to plug in my code into yours soon. So please work?" and I felt very guilty about that.

And even after I started work - and I didn't sleep like the other two - I knew that I did not match up to their level of focus. Sometime around 4 in the morning I did a count of Biyan's code and it was up to 1500 lines. Sure, there was a lot of whitespace, but my jaw dropped when I did the count, because I was quickly scrolling through the file and I figured out what she was writing and it was bloody complicated. The algorithm for check probably gave her the most trouble. And she was doing this on 2-3 hours of sleep.

Wave was also the first assignment in which I finally got to write code. As in - proper code - not the weak little descriptive languages like HTML and CSS with which I'd been playing since I was 15. Haocong said: "I need you to write this function, and you call this function from the back-end, and the parameters are this," and then he left me to do it. I really liked that. Here he was, an NOI programmer from his home country, and he trusted me to write stuff. I did it and I was quite pleased with myself after that. Learning a new programming language felt very satisfying; I'd only wished I'd done it sooner.

And there are other things, of course. Haocong spent a lot of time helping the two of us, because he finished his bit - the backend code - in about a night. I found that amazing. Haocong is probably the most understated elite programmer I've seen in 3216 so far - he doesn't say much, and he doesn't show off, but he gets things done. And then he tells you what he still needs done, instead of writing it himself, even though you probably know your code would take him all of 30 minutes to do. "When did you learn Javascript?" I asked him - and he said (without any trace of irony or inflection): "Last night."

(I think he took slightly longer to learn objective-C, but Mismatch currently has an iPhone version, and it looks great on his laptop. So I must say that, overall, it was a real learning experience working on this Wave app with him.)

Two more things.

First: our team made the mistake of waterfalling our software. I believe I've learnt my lesson - I won't do that again. Ever. Halfway through - at around 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning, I looked up from my code and said, thoughtfully: "You know what we should've done? We should've sat down together and written a whole list of interfaces before we started." And I remember Haocong sighing to that.

In the end, however, our app managed to work when we plugged things into each other the night of the deadline - but just barely. I thank God that we were writing a webapp, and not something bigger or more complex. And that became very true! Things began to be really scary when it hit 11pm and we were still nowhere near a playable chess game. Never again, I tell myself; never again.

Second: I no longer find myself insecure about my programming abilities. That is not to say that I'm great at it. I started real programming last semester, which was really late, and I found - to my surprise - how much I really enjoyed writing code. It was like finding a long lost friend. But because I was new to the school then, and new to so many things in Singapore, that I became scared and defensive when I saw all these great programmers in 1101 speaking in Java like it was their second language. They were better than me and they knew it. They didn't hesitate to talk over my head to show off how good they were with their code, and they compared lab marks with each other, and they asked me how much I got for my exams and my tutorials, sizing me up as potential competition and then then reconsidering that when they learnt I was new to this. And this made me really insecure - as silly as that may sound.

Today, however, I now know that these kids - while good - are nowhere near the level of Haocong or Biyan or Hung or Adhiraj. And that's a comforting thought. It means that I don't have to worry about those kids, for they are an order of a magnitude below than the 3216 programmers ... who are, in turn, an order of a magnitude below than the best programmers in the world. And I think that's important to know. What this means is that I needn't compare myself to them - because I know I'm new to this and I now know there's always somebody who's better than me. I have learned that what I really should be focusing on is the programming itself, because it's fun, and it's beautiful, and not the competition, or even the grades, because I shouldn't let all that taint the learning itself. And I think that is important.

Programming to me is fun and I hope to keep it that way. I'm glad I learned that from Wave. And so now: onward.

The Fear

So here's the thing. I have only one exam left, and it's still bad. I've figured out by now that I'm scared of exams. As in, phobic. As in psychologically-scarred-when-young-because-cat-bites-you-and-you-now-no-like-cats kinda scared. It's probably the STPM speaking again. Can't shake it off. And so but yeah, I got into university because I did a few really cool things. So what? I know you're going to tell me that academics don't matter, but fact remains, when you're in school and you're studying because it costs so damn much per semester, comments like that don't seem real. No kidding, you say. But academics do matter, especially when you're talking about an exam-oriented society like ours. (Yes - if it makes you feel better it's the same thing in Singapore). And so it's rather anal - you're studying programming, say - which is the most practical thing you'll study in my course - and then you meet people who're all about "How many marks did you get?" and "I thought they might ask this in the exam, so I worked on it!" and "Ah I didn't get full marks for that lab" and the focus suddenly becomes scoring As, instead of learning the tools for the sake of learning the tools, and/or you do things because you want to beat all the other people so you can win that scholarship/bursary/summa cum laude.

I know this is unfair of me, especially since we don't really have any alternative to exams, and marks, and bell-curves. But it's produced really strange behaviour, all around us. Like, for instance, you're discussing the application of ethics on computing in the real world, and the discussion suddenly turns into a 'how to answer this for the exam?' smooge fest. Have you had an experience like that? Have you thought it strange? I have! I find it very strange! I couldn't get my head around it! Why on earth would you talk exams, if ethical conundrums and technological paradoxes really might happen to you in your professional life, later on? Has this no relevance to your life, beyond the testpaper?

But even as I'm saying these things, a small voice at the back of my head tells me that I have no right to talk. Who am I, after all? I have no good reason to strut into classrooms, looking like I understand the technicalities of everything being taught before me; nor do I have the confidence borne from a long history of academic excellence. I am a scraper. I am a weird hodgepodge of talents that don't count in any academic assessment. I am a square peg in a round hole (or was it the other way around?) And no, I am not very useful in an exam ... in everything else, yes; in the real world, maybe - but in an exam it feels, at times, like I am a sneak. I know I should stop ranting. But it's frightening to pause and think of all the exams ahead of me in the next four years, and all the other academicos that I have to compete with. Fours years. Rather long time. Frightening indeed.

Vignettes

It is 2am and I'm filling my bottles with hot water, from the shared dispenser in Block 4. I meet Kris, who's in Comp Engineering, and there's this other guy with him. They're both buying food from the junk-food vendor.

"Wow, up late." I say, stirring my noodles.

"Yah, going back now."

"And you?"

The other guy gets his packet of chips. He pauses and looks up at us. Grins. "Oh, just got back from practice."

"At 2am?!" I say; "From where?" Kris says.

"School of music; I'm a music student."

We stare at him, blankly.

"Woww ..."

"Yes -"

"What instrument?"

"Oh, piano - "

"And the school of music is open till this hour?!"

"Oh yes," he says, "We got about 40 practice rooms in the conservatory. All grand pianos."

"Grand pianos?!" Kris and I say, together.

"Yes." He laughs.

"Is it hard? I mean - the course, is it hard?"

"Oh yes. Very. I mean - I practice until 2, right?"

We talk about a few other things, and then I gather my bottles and my mug full of noodles, and gesture towards my block. "Got to go now."

"Okay," Kris says, and then - as an afterthought: "You going to sleep?"

I don't pause: "No," I say.

"I thought so."

Kris nods, the music guy smiles understandably, and I return to my room.

The First Week Review

I am sitting here at the desk in my room, dressed in the sweatiest clothes I have had in half a year. Two library books - a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace and a primer on theater critique - lie untouched in my bag, which is, in turn, flung at a corner under the table by my feet. My bed is clean, but is currently a yellow sprawl of plastic bags and wallet and soiled clothes and other little things like earbuds and cup holders (cup-holders!?) that I must've left while on the way out to do the dishes.

My dishes, sorry. I have to take care of them. They belong to me. Only me. No one else.

God, university life is different.

I know I should have written about Singapore and NUS and life here long ago, but a lot of things have happened in the past 3 weeks, things that I want to talk to you about, but don't know where to start. And I suppose the other partial reason is this little thing called writer's block, in which I want to produce the most wonderful, word-perfect essay on the first week of University anyone's ever produced, and this - naturally - prevents me from sitting down and organizing my thoughts, and letting them flow from head to hand.

So yes, I know, I'm a perfectionist idiot. Which is why I'm writing this now - exhausted and hot and sweaty I am - because that part of my brain that screams INFERIOR SENTENCE DELETE DELETE DELETE is woozy and sweat-drunk and I can write whatever I want without it spontaneously combusting into tiny little shrapnel chips that ricochet around in my head and leave little trails of grey mush. Which isn't a very good sentence. But just - you know - just testing.

(And also - my judogi is in the middle of a wash cycle now, so I have to wait for that to finish before I can go to sleep. And I haven't bathed. And my clothes stink to the high heavens. Didn't I tell you that University life is different?)

It's different in other surreal little ways too, like this one night morning I was walking around, 3 am, to pick up an indemnity form from Val - who printed it for me - and it was dark and quiet and there were no people around, and then I walked past this project room and through a tiny sliver between the curtains I saw a group of 8 boys clustered around a table playing DOTA. No sound at all. Just the occasional swear-word, and even then only audible right outside the window. Eight frowning faces, eight flashing computer screens, and the velvet dark of an early morning.

But anyway. I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm not going to talk about Singapore - or about NUS, for that matter - not in this post. I'll save that for another day. What I do want to talk about, however, is the first week of lecture, and my thoughts on the classes I'm taking this semester. That first week just finished today, in the sense that last Monday was a public holiday, and so I only sat for those missed lectures this afternoon.

Now all NUS students have to take five modules (or subjects) per sem, and we have to bid for them through a pretty complicated auction system called CORS, which works somewhat like the system Google designed for Adwords - but with protection, appeals, and an idiosyncratic currency system. But it's not necessary to explain that for this post. I'm taking five modules this semester, and being in the School of Computing means that I only have to bid for two, seeing as three are given to me by the faculty at the start of term. So, here they are, with my thoughts, in order:

CS1101 Programming Methodology is this heavy module that works as an introduction to programming. The lectures are all small sectional classes, conducted in little groups in computer labs, and my teacher is this guy called Tan Tiow Seng, who did a hilarious introductory talk at the beginning of our orientation week about Alumni and the School of Computing (in which he called everyone in the faculty crazy horses). I like him, and I think the module's going to be an interesting one, even if it is a little tough.

CS1231 Discrete Structures is a math course, and is intertwined with the programming things taught in CS1101. It's probably the hardest course I'm taking this semester. I am, apparently, really lucky this year, because I have a French lecturer called Stefane Bresson, and he's nothing short of brilliant. He actually makes math interesting, and as an added bonus he speaks in a funny French accent that's a breath of fresh air after all the Singlish you hear on a grating day-to-day basis.

CS1105 Computing and Society is to computing students what Pengajian Am was to Form 6. As in PA, we study all sorts of amazing, mindblowing things like ethics and computers and how computers have changed society and how Facebook really sucks because like so your boss can google you and find your Facebook profile and add you and then browse through all your drunk-like-siaw photos, and thus proceed to fire you after having weird gay dreams that somehow always involve you and a bottle of scotch.

SSA3201 Singapore English-Language Theatre is an SS (Singapore Studies) module, which is simply a category of modules that all NUS students are required to take. I think we have a Malaysian equivalent too, in our own universities, called - err - Malaysian Studies. But anyway. I chose this one because I figured that since I needed to complete an SS sooner or later, why not choose a module that was in a field that I liked? And I think I made the right choice - it's really challenging, in a way that Malaysian high school subjects aren't ... and that's probably because original thought and justified interpretation is the standard to which we are all supposed to work at. And our lecturer is a diva. A male diva. He rocks. I was late to his first lecture (alarm was set to 8.30 pm, woke up at 11.55, lecture started at 12; swore: shitshitshitshit ... and then I got lost) and he's really quite the personality. Term assignment? 10-50 page essay, on a past year exam question of my choice.

NM1101E Communications, New Media and Society was the lecture I took this afternoon, and boy, was it jam-packed. The student body spilled out of the chairs and onto the theatre stairs, and on the floor at the back of the hall. I took this subject out of interest, to see what other things I could learn about digital content, and now I'm beginning to wonder about that decision. The first lecture seemed too ... fun. The teacher in charge's American, and she's got this wicked sense of humour (she tells us that our finals will be laugh-out-load-Reader's-Digest-joke-section funny, because she wants us to laugh in the exam hall ... and anecdotal accounts on the web from last year actually confirm this), and she also believes in involving the whole audience in whatever session she's doing. We were promised documentary films, and student participation, and these things called Techno Breaks where we'd stop whatever we were doing and get up and do some fun activity - which, today, was a game designed to gauge our media consumption habits. It was crazy-assed fun. A little too fun. Like a party rather than a class. Which is frightening, to say the least.

And so but then I need to go check on my laundry now, but I'll write soon. About Singapore, about the University, and about the people I've met. Till then.

Your Hair Tickles My Ear (WSDC)

1.

The Grand Finals for the Swinburne World Schools Debating Championship is held in the Swinburne Sarawak campus Lecture Hall, a beautiful, carpeted, multistage auditorium with plush green-and-white padding for walls and crystal acoustics (if you're interested, that is - like I was - in the tonal differences of each speaker's voice). The adjudicators sit in two rows of cushioned ecstacy, 2nd and 3rd from the front; flow sheets and paper on black plastic surfaces that swing out at an angle from the sides of the auditorium seats. In front of them is a scrum of photographers. Their faces are attached to the behinds of their mounted SLRs, which are in turn attached to silver aluminium frames and adjusted to handle the orange downlights of the hall. Everyone, from adjudicator to lensmen to the 100 odd students seated in all extremeties of the auditorium, is staring at two benches and a presentation platform; rising up over these is a projector screen, displaying the motion for the Grand Final; in the middle, dead centre in the front of the hall, is a single mounted mike. It is from this mike that the final speeches of the final debate of WSDC 2009 are delivered, and it is from this mike that the dreams of so many individuals of the past four days are awarded, or destroyed.

To understand the weight of the competition in that room, in what is but an intra-school debate competition, you would first have to understand the context of this final debate. The Swinburne World Schools Debating Championship is a yearly tournament held at high school level in the icy classrooms and the carpeted halls of the Swinburne Sarawak campus. Most of this competition happens in the aging G-block auditorium in the main Swinburne building, with its vomit-coloured carpeting and its 9-flights of stairs and its lack of reliable elevators; and also in two rooms with uncovered ceilings in the B-block. Each high school is allowed to enter up to four teams, divided by age category: two teams for the Seniors (Form 4 and above), and two teams for the Juniors (Form 3 and below). WSDC is four years old as of press time; it is organized by a team of highly-experienced Uni-level debators and administrators, it owes a huge amount of support to Swinburne's academic staff, and it owns a solid reputation for being the only debate competition worth joining in the whole of Kuching city.

This year, however, that reputation took a hit. The Grand Finals (THW respect the right of North Korea and Iran to develop its nuclear potential) between Gapor A and St Joseph A turned out to be one of the messiest debates in the entire competition. And that is strange, if you think about it, for two particular reasons. The first reason is that the scoring systems in debate tournaments are designed to promote the very best teams to the finals (as in every other competitive sport system, to be honest). Good teams don't normally cause messy debates - if they do, they know how to salvage them at the latter part of the round. In simple terms, an uncharacteristically messy debate in the finals would mean that the two teams in the finals aren't the best in the competition, but they got there anyway. Secondly, consider: it is within the organizers' best interests to have a lively, high quality debate at the tail end of the tournament, not only because the finals is the round that matters most, but also because they are the ones with the most people watching. The very fact that the GF was a lacklustre debate should raise a few red flags in anyone's head - and for good reason. Something went wrong in this year's WSDC. Something allowed two lacklustre teams access to the finals, and something allowed two uncharacteristically lousy debates to happen in front of a hundred-odd audience. The feedback I'd gotten from high school students, post-competition, have largely been negative, with one or two telling me that they're 'pissed off with Swinburne'. I do not believe that this is Swinburne's fault. I believe instead that a series of things came together in exactly the wrong way to cause a general skew in this year's competition results. This post attempts to explain how this happened.

2.

Swinburne WSDC as a debate tournament is organized in the generally accepted fashion of international debate competition. It's divided into two stages: the first, called the preliminaries, consist of a collection of rounds used to determine the 8 teams that would later advance into the second section. This second section are the elimination rounds, where losing means being kicked out of the competition. Swinburne's system is designed to keep the strongest teams in play, and they accomplish this via two particular ways. The preliminary matchups are done by power placement, a mathematical approach to pit teams of equal ability against each other. How exactly they calculate this and what algorithms they use I won't know, but let's say for the sake of argument that this system is perfect, and that it gives us at the end of the prelims an ideal list of teams arranged according to ability. The top 8 teams on that list for both categories is then taken out and moved into the elimination rounds. The second system that Swinburne uses is simple: in the elimination stage the strongest teams (that is, the teams that placed at the top of the break) are pitted against the weakest teams (the ones at the bottom). This means that the top team goes up against the 8th team, the 2nd against the 7th, and so on so forth. Hypothetically, at least, this system allows the good debators an easier run into the finals.

The second system that we need to talk about when we want to figure out what went wrong in WSDC is the way adjudication is carried out. Swinburne's system does not allow conferring of opinion between adjudicators while giving out scores. They assume that all adjudicators have experience in judging debate, and therefore each and every individual should make their own decisions according to that experience. Again, this system makes sense at an international level - in a competition where all adjudicators are above a certain threshold of experience, a prevention of opinion-sharing helps to stop overly-opinionated people from influencing the decisions of other adjudicators. A gag-order also provides a check and balance to the inherent subjectivity of the sport - sometimes (though this happens very rarely) debates are so close that the winning team becomes a matter of opinion, in which case a majority decision in an odd-numbered panel is the fairest way of deciding the winner.

The one last thing that we've got to make clear before we move on to what went wrong: adjudication in debate is a tricky thing. There are half a dozen different things an adjudicator needs to look out for - and the most important of these is the difference between a good debator and a good public speaker. There is a tendency for inexperienced adjudicators to award rounds based on the speaking ability of the speakers, ignoring in the process the importance of debate skills like strategy and flexibility and the ability to highlight relevant issues at the right time in the debate. I'd say that non-debators have a harder time knowing when a debator they're adjudicating is doing something smart vs when he's just spewing wonderful-sounding garbage. The earlier matches of WSDC saw teachers entering debate rooms as trainees, under experienced Swinburne debators. They had no say on who won or lost the round. Midway through the prelims, however, some teachers demanded that they be allowed to adjudicate in proper, at which point Dr Sooch agreed and placed them as panelists.

3.

So what happened this year? If we look at the the preliminary rounds we will find that certain teams had an easier time breaking into the elimination stage: St Mary A for instance, went up against 4 junior teams. On the flip side, we see junior teams like Green Road D competing against 4 senior teams in 4 out of their 5 prelim rounds. I'd like you to note that this happens even in top international competitions, especially when those competitions have teams that number in the hundreds. But in this case the random-luck effect was made more pronounced by the fact that the algorithm used in power matching failed to take into account the real ability of these teams - like whether or not these teams were junior or senior (which, I'd say, matters more at high school level than at University level, due to the large gap in maturity between the two categories). All the system takes note of is the number of wins vs the number of losses, and the teams who win go up against other teams who also win. In this system, it doesn't take a genius to figure out there would be scenarios in which junior teams who win against other junior teams suddenly find themselves up against a senior team that has also won in the last round (and that when they lose that round, they suddenly find themselves against another senior team ... but one that lost the last round). Because the algorithm does not discriminate between quality of wins, certain teams benefit, going up against multiple junior teams, while other teams lose out.

These imperfections in the preliminary matchups meant that the results in the elimination rounds were affected as well. Teams that shouldn't have met up in the Quarters and the Semis did, and having two high-quality teams go up against each other in earlier elimination rounds meant that there was less of a chance of the best teams ending up in the finals. 

But there's more to it than that. Let's take a look at the two finalists of the Junior category - which by the way, between them performed a classic lousy debate in the Junior finals. Both these teams benefited from an added effect - one that came about through a flaw in the adjudication systems. The gag-order between adjudicators in debate rounds that made sense at international level worked against WSDC, simply because they were not designed to compensate for inexperienced adjudicators. St Teresa C won a prelim round even though they'd presented a hung-case because two high school teachers overrode the Chair.^[1] Lodge C, in turn, won an elimination round because two teachers overrode their Chair and awarded their team the debate, making their decision solely on the performance of Lodge's 3rd speaker. ^[2] 

A few things happened as a direct result of such overrides. Firstly, two teams that otherwise would not have made it to the Junior finals did, and performed a below-average debate in full view of the 15 schools that were watching (108 or so students, plus teachers, plus photographers, plus VIPs). Secondly, because inexperienced adjudicators are more pursuaded by style over strategy and substance, the speaker rankings were skewed in favour of debators with better elocution. The top 3 speakers in the rankings, for instance, are the ones with impeccable delivery, while other debators displaying more valuable but less obvious debate skills like strategic savvy and the ability to construct a response-case on the fly were displaced, and placed lower down in the overall competition.

4.

An obvious question to ask now would be: who do you blame? And the answer to that isn't as clear-cut as you might suppose. Some high school debators got prissy with Swinburne in the aftermath of the competition, but now that we've taken a look at the systems and the flaws that lead to these results, I think that we can no longer say that Swinburne and Swinburne alone is at fault for these imperfections. A major problem with this competition was from adjudication, and the lack of experience amongst the adjudicators that took part in this year's tournament. But let's be honest: how many high school teachers out there have debated anyway? And how many adjudicators could Swinburne pull in to handle the huge number of teams that participated this year? You've to remember that all the universities in Kuching - even the Swinburne students themselves - were on study leave for their mid-term exams. Adjudicators that came from UNIMAS and UiTM last year could not make it this time around because they were caught up with their own exam schedules. And, most importantly, you cannot blame the organizers for the imperfections of a fair system, the same way you cannot hate the government for the occasional hiccup that happens in a democracy.

That isn't to say that I don't worry. I teach debate in St Thomas's and in St Mary's. I teach my speakers how to create cases, what good arguments are, and how to best deliver them. I worry whenever teams like St Teresa - who benefit from public speaking ability - win places in debate finals due to adjudicator inexperience. I wonder too if there is any way to circumvent this, considering that we're in East Malaysia, after all, and we have but a small pool of debators to source adjudicators from. For if undeserving teams win debate competitions, and undeserving speakers win speaker awards, then the connection between effort and reward will eventually and irrevocably be severed, and frayed, and torn asunder. And then it'll be harder to get kids to continuously improve, for why work hard when winning is but a lottery?

5.

The first speaker of the Grand Final is Rebekah Dawn Ba'o Ritchie. Her hair is orange in the glow of the auditorium's downlights, and her face pale against the black of the microphone. She is one of the better debators in this year's competition. I suppose it wouldn't be too far along to say that she is the reason Gapor A are here in the finals - I remember adjudicating her in Prelim 5 over a motion I had advised my debators never to touch, and by the end of her 1st Opp speech I realized that I was looking at a classic policy-response case - the kind that I myself would've done, had I been in her shoes.

Bekah walks to the front now, in white baju kurung, while Ashik introduces her as '... wants to be a bouncer in SoHo when she grows up' and the crowd cheers their approval. Dr Sooch is sitting directly in front of me and he's drawing lines on a sheet of paper with a black pen. I look down at my flow sheet, and up again, in time to see Bekah tapping at the mike ...

She looks up at us now, the hundred or so people in the hall, and begins. "Good morning I bid to the Floor ..."

And the debate has started proper, and I remember thinking to myself, praying, even, that it would be a clean, good one. But in the space of those few words the debate is still full of promise, because just sitting at the Finals, in an adjudicator's chair, you don't think of systems and flaws and problems, you think of ideas and arguments, and the verbal wordplay that will unfold before you. I bite my lip and begin writing furiously. The debate is on.

^1. You can't blame them, really - not many high school debators know what a hung case is, what more to say their teachers? ↩

^2. This is known, in debate circles, as the Crescendo Effect. The Crescendo Effect states that speakers who speak later in a debate will have greater influence on the adjudicators, primarily because speeches you heard last are easier to remember. Good adjudicators usually compensate for this effect by keeping rigorous notes, and giving wins based on those. ↩

The STPM Results

I am on the phone with Pn Eng, my Form 6 class teacher, and it is several hours after I have received my STPM results slip. The room is dark; the lights from the outside neighbourhood are refracted through the glass panels of my windows and they spray down into little golden splinters over the bedroom floor. All is silent but for the occasional neighbourhood car, and my voice.

"Oh yes, and about tomorrow -"

"Are you coming?" Pn Eng asks. She wants U6S4 to go to St Thom, during recess, to pray in thanksgiving for the results that we've gotten. I swallow a lump in my throat and look at my hands, bathed yellow as they are in the alley lights. I've had that lump for most of the day now; it is the kind of tightness you may feel if you're about to cry. That lump is my body's reaction to sadness. It is my shock, my grief, my outrage all balled into a small ping-pong sized mass, dense and black and lodged deep in my trachea.

"Thanksgiving?" I let out a harsh laugh. "Of what?"

"Oh you know ... that you didn't get worse results than this ..."

In spite of the lump I feel my lips lifting into a smile: "But that's ... that's like saying 'Oh, an atom bomb exploded in the US, at least it didn't explode in Malaysia, right?'"

"Yaya!" Pn Eng says, "Something like that!"

And then we laugh, and the nightmare seems to lift a little.

I recognize here that it is always harder for people to respond to bad news, particularly if said bad news is cataclysmically life-changing. I did not realize this, on the afternoon after the STPM results came out. My SMSes were terse single liners, telling the friends who asked what they wanted to know, and no more. Many didn't reply for hours afterwards. I went to a movie in the intermission.^[1] And it was only after it finished and Roscharch pulled off his mask for the last time that I realized - shocked - that most of my friends weren't replying because they did not know what to say.

And so this post will not be about me. We have a lot to celebrate and a lot to be thankful about, and I will not dampen the spirits of my friends out there, the ones who read this blog, and who have every right in the world to be over the moon. I will not a) rant, b) moan, or c) pity myself. They deserve better.

First off: to Pn Eng, teacher extraordinaire, thank you for being with us in Form 6. Thank you for not killing me when I blew up the Chemistry lab, thank you for putting up with our (sometimes practical) jokes, thank you for not giving up on us throughout the academic year. I wish you only the best (and then some!) as you head off for a 6-month extended holiday in Kangaroo land. And, yes, don't look at me like that - a holiday is a holiday is a holiday (Heh. Heh. Heh).

To Fion, to Nyuk Choo, to Abe, to Tay, to Chai Fuen, to Yi Han, and to all those who achieved results you can be proud of (and in some cases, straight As!) ... congratulations. I pray that you will put on good boots and chase worthy stars in the short gap before dawn. And that in the end, when you look back on your life, you would've lived a life worth living.

To Nick: WOOOHOOO WOOZAH CAMBRIDGE BABEH! I pray that you'll get a scholarship and that you'll finally get to do what you've always wanted ... and I pray that I never have to meet you in a terminally wasted capacity (that was a joke ... meaning I'm the patient ... err, you can laugh now). It's been a pleasure knowing you, and your friendship - along with your driving skills - I'll remember forever.

To Horng Eng, to Amanda, to Paul, to Elaine, to Sam, to Tracy: thank you for being my sounding boards. Thank you for calling me and kicking me and telling me to stand up and fight at some of the most depressing moments of the STPM. To Horng Eng, in particular, thank you for that hour-long conversation the night after the Math T paper, the one where I felt like giving up after being panicked and caffeine-disoriented and scared shitless. It could've been a lot worse without you.

And finally; most importantly, to God: thank you. Thank you for the great friends you've placed in my life, and thank you (dare I say it?) for these results (yes I do!). It may feel like a cosmic joke at the moment, or a particularly bad horror movie, but one day I'll look back and see how the dots connect, and give heaven a general thumbs up. 

So ends - with a single sheet of printed paper, ribbed at the edges and smudged blue with fingerprints - a 1.5-year period of my life. The postmodern philosopher Nietzsche once said that 'whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger', and while I don't agree with everything that man has to say, this particular quote seems apt for my current situation. Onward now; I've got a thin sliver of opportunity left to me, and I better catch it before it slips away.

^1. I fear that I may never watch Watchmen again, in the same way that some Holocaust survivors can no longer look upon certain innocent glens and brooks in their country without feeling pain; these were spots where they watched their families die years and years ago. ↩

Endnotes: For those of you who demand specifics: I got 2B+ and 2C+ for my STPM. Which is, frankly, a total failure. Paul's reaction to the news was particularly telling (of how my batch sees these kind of results): he was silent for a long while and then when he spoke again you got the distinct feeling that this would be how he'd react had you told him you'd gotten a girl pregnant after a night of passion.

The unanswered question: how did it happen? remains mercilessly unanswered. There are a whole bunch of speculative reasons, of which I will spare you but the most salient: I panicked; I switched study techniques too late in the game; I was a distracted, non-analytically-gifted individual who had his priorities wrong and who collapsed just before the finishing line; I was burned out. All the above are true, and all of them contributed to what is probably the biggest disappointment of my life. But that's beside the point now - I made a decision, I made a series of mistakes, and now I have to live with the consequences. No way out now, but up.

A Few Notes On University Hunting

You tire from it. You tire from writing long, mint-perfect letters of recommendation - letters of self-love so repulsive in nature as to be unimaginable, being turned into an institutional requirement by the gatekeepers to universities and scholarships like that. Have you given thought to the act of recommending yourself? - an idea uncomfortable to me, for would an author, or a playwright, or a musician ever review himself? Nice young chap, balls still intact, fairly handsome - please consider for employment thank you so much for your time. The proper word is sell. You're forced to sell now, and sell yourself, and ignore the multitude of sellers around you who're all selling at the same frequency so as to prompt you to think up some new selling technique like putting on that pink shirt you have at the back of your closet - yes that one you never wear - the one with the HE'S STUPID with little arrows pointing to the people unfortunate enough to stand around you in the crowd; and you're hoping that that's enough to get you noticed, to be picked out of the noise and the sweat and the pushing bodies and plunked into a chair and grilled sufficiently so as to wipe the perma-smile off your face.

And the most horrible thing about the process is how normal it is. How the world is arranged around such detestable acts of selling, where actions don't always speak louder than words and where boasting is fine as long as you put on a tie and a perma-smile. And you receive this as a slap to your face because this is how things are, after all - and you better get used to it, or you'll be left behind while the adults get to play ball.

Grow up, you. Put on a tie. Welcome to the real world. 

Drive

Well here I am, one month into the new year, and I have done absolutely nothing with my life. I am blocked. Jamned up like a photocopier on a bad hair day. If I were standing outside in the rain and looking in to the residual glow of my life, I would see one boy with his hands in his pockets, knee-deep and stuck in a large cesspool of misshapen insecurities. Just past this side of the waterfall dear, and you're good to go, but you just have to get past that first whirlpool ...

We celebrate two new years every year here in Kuching, simply because we're Chinese and when you're Chinese you never want to lose out on anything. Especially if anything includes food. So I'm not only sitting here and stuck with this Godawful block, but I'm also sitting here feeling fat after eating too much over the holidays. I think it was two years ago that I felt like a diabetic shrimp after visiting with my Church youth ... but - wait where was I? Oh yes. Diabetic shrimp. Quite a delectable phrase, considering shrimps don't come with kidneys ... what? You mean I wasn't talking about that before? Then what was I talking about?

Welcome to the cesspool, folks. 

This isn't the first time it's happened. I had a huge block after the SPM too, and I whittled away 4-5 months doing absolutely nothing more than typing and eating and sleeping and chores. Oh yes, chores. I think my parents think that I'm God's gift to smelly dogs, and they make me bathe mine twice a week. Because the dog stinks at about that frequency. I'd have never gotten a dog if I actually knew about the body odour. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

I think my main problem right now is a lack of a schedule. I write, code and design best when I'm busy with schoolwork, and that in itself is a remarkably daft thing to do, seeing as there just isn't enough time to do everything all at the same time when you're hurrying for assignments and such. I suck. I'll admit it. I suck. 

I've never wanted to be in school as much as I do now.

N.B. Comments are closed.

Hindsight

I finished watching Quantum of Solace a couple of nights back. And it was when James Bond finally caught the villain and said goodbye to the girl and the credits rolled up the screen that I realized that I could no longer avoid writing about the STPM. Things started two years ago had now come full circle with the movie. I couldn’t ignore those things, and I was by then sick of waking up from repeated nightmares of the STPM Math T paper. So here I sit: pen in mouth, screen on word processor, trying my best to relive - in paragraphs - a very personal hell that ended two or so weeks ago.

The story of a Malaysian public exam begins not with the first day you enter the exam hall, IC and exam slip and pencil-case clutched to your pounding chest; but in the moment you decide to sit for it. I can tell you that there are a hundred alternatives to taking one: some of my privileged friends jump ship (quite literally) onto the sandy beaches of Australia or New Zealand. Others run away to Singapore, that eternally kiasu land of the underperforming birth register. For the Form 6 student the decision to sit for the STPM is often a bitter one by the end of the year: all of us had had the opportunity to go somewhere – anywhere – and to carry on with our lives without ever sitting for another bloody Malaysian paper. But we made our choice and we picked that path. Or perhaps someone picked it for us.

A person wiser than I am pointed out to me a long time ago that certain individuals lived their entire lives in the shelter of one institution or another. These were the people who would grow up under the shelter of school and would later skitter, when it was time, under the open sky the same way a rabbit might cross a meadow: fearful of the hawk and the eagle; fearful of death from above. The shelters that would invariably follow would be predictable and safe: the University, the Company, eventually the Retirement Plan, sometimes the Hospice. Form 6 was a way to stretch the first shelter, and stretch it I did.




The STPM is tough. Some say that it is the third hardest pre-U examination on the planet, though I cannot find any evidence that actually proves this. (Most of it is I think nothing more than hearsay, passed on in kopitiams and Internet forums. There's a thread on a student forum somewhere that eventually spirals into a heated rhetorical discussion on why the education system sucks and why our keris-weilding education minister should be fired. Very Malaysian. Yes). But the STPM is hard, I'll grant it that. But it's also public, and it is free, and you cannot really argue with free.

There is something inexorably sad about a Malaysian public exam. Thousands of our students go through them every year, but very few talk about it in gatherings beyond the uncomfortable shrug and a singular wave of hand. Our newspapers are comfortable with writing about the success stories, the girls and the boys who achieve ever-escalating numbers of A1s and A+s. We are happy to indulge ourselves in newspaper ads advertising 'the secrets to success' for students, filled with glowing pictures of parent and child and some equally glowing statement (eg: Student Success Program has enabled my darling Tiffany to score straight As for her UPSR/PMR/SPM! Thank you so much Student Success Program!). We also have television ads selling us 'exam grade' stationary, acted out by bookish smart-looking students who jump in the air with pencils and erasers clutched in their hands, or who look up from an exam paper and flash us a megawatt smile and a thumbs-up. Which is really, totally, surreal.

But our society is a strange one, and we are used to keeping mum about the most obvious of things. Nobody - and this is also strange - has actually written about the experience of sitting for a major public exam. We regard our exams as a necessary rite of passage in our society - we treat it like puberty and sex: human experiences that everybody would go through sooner or later. So I suppose what happens after is perfectly natural: we get everything over and done with, and then we fast forward the next few months in the hopes of erasing all memory of what went on during the bloody thing.




A Malaysian public exam begins in the choice to sit for it, and in my case I chose Form 6. As a whole those two years taught me - more than anything - how to be lonely. My schedule for a good part of 2008 went something along the lines of Monday: Judo; Tuesday: Judo; Wednesday: Tuition; Thursday: Judo; Friday: Tuition; Saturday: Gym; Sunday: Judo/Stamina Training. I now have no idea how I survived all that, but three months ago my father attended an Old Thomian dinner and sat next to my Math teacher, who was a school mate from his era. They talked, and eventually he turned to my father and demanded to know why I was sleeping so much in class.

Other things changed. My friends eventually stopped asking me out for movies and drinks; I found that I could no longer identify with many them. Most were more interested for me to hear about their lives, rather than to listen to me talking about mine. I was also lonely because I was the only Form 6 student on the state team, and nobody else could identify with the academic and physical workload I was carrying for half the year. The pressure was intense. I looked for empathy, but it was very hard to find: very few people around me could understand the fatigue of what I was going through. I remember thinking once that I could share my problems with the Thomians on the state bowling team, but then I realized that most of them were staring whenever us Judo guys came to the gym. We screamed with our squats; they did dumbbell rolls.

Sitting here, writing this, I guess that maybe I tapped into mental reserves I never knew I had; but I believe I also got through because I learned to draw upon the strength of a few of my friends. Most didn't listen to me, or didn't want to - I often directed our conversations to their lives, their problems. And, yes, while it wasn't perfect it was very soothing: talking to them about inconsequential things reminded me that there was a world out there, and it wasn't all Judo and exams. The talking about myself I left to God - He was probably the only empathetic person who knew what I was going through, and I worked out most of my frustrations through Him. Form 6 was a year where I became Christian again, in an inward way, a quiet way.




There is a very specific kind of panic associated only with exams. It is a kind of guilty, flighty weight that drops onto your lap when you're not busy studying for one subject or other. Before a public exam any time not spent in front of a book is time wasted, and every Malaysian student knows this instinctively. But your panic only gets worse when when you cannot for the life of you bring yourself to start. Once you do start, however, a different kind of torture emerges.

I never did liked studying. When I was 9 or 10 I came up with the ingenious solution of putting a novel in the centre of an open Chinese textbook, and I lifted the book to my face so that anybody looking from afar would assume I was studying Chinese. I completed quite a few novels this way, including perhaps a quarter of the Hardy Boys series. I had a fantastic time, until my parents caught me.

Serious studying for a public examination differs from person to person. Some of my friends study best when in a group, and they stay back in the libraries of their respective schools, poring over books and memorizing equations into the wee hours of the night. I learned very quickly that two things were problems for me: 1) I was easily distracted, and 2) I wasn't a reader.

The first I solved by downloading albums and listening to them on my iPod, playing them on constant loop until they blotted out the sentient sounds of any study area. There are now several albums I will never touch again, chief amongst them TV On The Radio's seminal Dear Science. The second problem I solved by doing exercises on sheaves of paper, crumpling them en masse at the end of the week and tossing them into my bedroom's wastepaper basket. My bedroom itself became a place I could barely recognize: I rarely did any studying there, chiefly because it was filled to the brim with distractions any geek would immediately love - novels and magazines and my writing notebooks, plus little puzzles and Pokemon figures that you couldn't help but mess with.

No, I did my studying at the dining table, under a freezing air conditioner. And later on, when my youngest sister finished with her PMR and began watching TV and generally started to have a good time I began to study at my aunt's place, at an uncomfortable dining table where I would occasionally set my head down against my textbooks, earbuds playing Radiohead, and sleep.

My study patterns changed because of one other thing. Some idiot at the top of St Thomas's administrative piramid thought it was a good idea to keep all the students in to the very last day of school. It was a logical failure on many fronts: most of the teachers had no idea what to do with us, and very few of the exercises they gave (save perhaps Chemistry) we finished. But the bigger problem with such policy was that each of us had different problems at that stage - some of us were weaker in Math, and some of us were weaker in Physics, and the only people who really did know and could affect change were ourselves. What we needed was the freedom to divide our time amongst the subjects according to our strengths and weaknesses, but what the school forced us to do was to sit and follow all the subjects, according to a rigid school timetable. I was beyond tired of arguing with the administrative office by then, so I changed my study patterns to suit my school days. Every night at about 11 I drank coffee, and turned in only around 2 or 3. I would then stumble through school and collapse at home in the afternoon, before beginning to study all over again at 7. It was a horrible study schedule, but it had to be done.




There is a very surreal quality to the opening minutes of your very first paper. It's a little like an out-of-body-experience: you open the question booklet and some part of you knows that these are the very questions coming generations will study and will attempt to trump. That same part of you can't believe you're actually sitting there, writing answers to questions that collectively, when finally marked, will determine you your future. But of course such thinking is counter-productive, and all of us learn to shut out that little voice very quickly in the opening minutes. The invigilators tell you the same things before each and every session: that cheating is not allowed, that you are only allowed to leave for toilets after the first 30 minutes and before the last 30. They don't talk about exits and life-jackets, but it's a close thing. Sometime during the Physics paper 2 I forget the toilet injunction, and I finish my last essay with my legs crossed so hard I had to take a couple of minutes to uncross them in a toilet cubicle later.

The STPM has papers divided over the space of three weeks, with two papers per week. I suppose this was to make sure you would go crazy long before the exams were over, and it was very effective in that regard. The second day was Math T, paper 1. I couldn't do half the questions, and I came home to a week of no-exams, half of which I spent staring at the ceiling, or the wall. I was depressed. I called my friends. Nick told me that it still wasn't over, that I shouldn't give myself room for regret. Horng Eng told me stories about her STPM, stories that both scared and provoked me. Paul told me to stop acting like an idiot.

My last paper was Physics paper 1. It was an objective paper, and it was a subject I sucked at. My friends were going to Richmond's Place later in the evening, they invited me but I could see they weren't convinced I would go. I didn't. I stood under the school hall, the sunlight gold and the shadows long, and I stared out at the empty carpark for a long time.




I enjoyed Quantum of Solace. Bond was still recovering from Vesper Lynd's death, and he had already turned into a man scarred by duty, one who never wanted to fall in love again. And at the end of the movie the beautiful Camille leans over to Bond and says to him: "I wish I could free you from your prison. But your prison is in there." And then she kisses him. I don't know what this says about me or pop culture, but I found myself identifying with it.

Two years ago when the SPM ended I shouted for joy. Garrick and Paul and I walked down McDougall road and made the crossing to the cinema. We were going to watch Casino Royale and we would be introduced to the world of Vesper Lynd and James Bond and the Aston Martin DBS for the very first time. The sunlight was gold and the shadows were long, and we were laughing and walking and talking and we had not a care in the world. It was a happy time, and why shouldn't it be? Our future was bright before us, like the evening sun that illuminated our faces; the same sun that lighted mine after the STPM, the sun that was the ending of a Malaysian public exam.

Writer's Note: This piece took an unbelievably long time to write, involving one draft and 5 unfinished ones, plus a semi-serious edit and polish. And I don't think it's very good. It seems that after every public exam I suffer a short period of writing depression, where I just can't seem to produce good stuff. Blasted exams. That being said, I hope to never revisit the months I spent doing the things I talked about above, so I beg your forgiveness if I leave this piece as it is. 

I Woke Up Today

I took this photo on the very last day of the STPM, an hour or so before the Physics paper started. It was probably the last time I'd be in school uniform, and I wanted to remember it. I know that I've a lot to write about, and a lot of people to thank, but I just spent a good part of today in virgin jungle, hunting for a rare medicinal tree. I'm tired. Grateful, sad, relieved, but also tired.

Thank you folks for waiting. I'll be back soon. Promise.

Goodbye

I know I said that I wouldn't be blogging till after the STPM, but I'm taking exception to this one post. Tomorrow is the last day of school. I've been sleeping at 3 everyday for the past 2-3 weeks, trying to work around the school hours, and I'll be glad to study full days now. STPM starts on the 18th.

I'll keep this post short. I entered St Thom six years ago, the result of a quick, thoughtless decision. My father asked me if I wanted "St Thomas's or St Joseph's?", and I said: "The first one lah. St Thom."

So here I am.

Goodbye folks. I'll miss you.

STPM

If there is only one good thing to have come out of 8 hour study sessions, then it is this:

My library is increasing at a rate of about 5 albums per week, and that's only because I'm running through most of them at about that pace. It's the only thing that's keeping me sane. My aunt, to me, this afternoon: "Are you dreaming or are you thinking?" she asks, and I pretend not to hear her. The windows are thrown open in front of me and it's a beautiful day out, but I'm shut behind a table, chin on hand, staring at the sky.

And if my parents are crying /then I'll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours

And escape.

Dreams

I am having my mock exams. The teacher passes down the Chemistry Paper 2 question papers and I ready my pencil. My watch is in front of me, my calculator is on the ready (that little underline thing blinking on off on off), my mind is set on Go.

"You may begin," she says, and I open the booklet.

The first question is about the periodic table - I see the familiar four-group diagram, and I am about to write when I realize that the question is in Chinese. I blink; and then I turn the pages, hurriedly now - and I discover that ALL THE QUESTIONS ARE IN CHINESE.

I am horrified. I turn to the front page, where all the instructions are, and I realize that it says there, right in the first line: 'This paper is bilingual. Students are expected to answer in their mother tongue.' I look around at my classmates and I find that they are all scribbling away at their answer scripts: Teck Chaw is biting his pencil as he thinks, Tay is making clucking noises at the first question, and I realize that I am alone in this -

I wake up in cold sweat.

A few days later I receive my Macbook in the mail. I open it, remove the instruction manual, the Apple stickers, the adapters, and then I tear open the bubble wrapping of my new Mac. I am happy as it chimes on, I type my name into the necessary fields, and I marvel at the beauty of OSX.

Then I go downstairs.

I cannot stop myself. There is this magnetic compulsion to leave my mark on my new laptop - as strong as whatever drives dogs to pee around their property, so I go downstairs and enter the kitchen and take a knife. And then I return to my Mac and I take out the knife ... and I carve my name onto the soft white plastic, under the lacquer Apple logo. As the cover peels under my fingers I am silently screaming in my head, unable to stop myself, but the knife keeps going on and on at the C of my name, deeper into the laptop -

I wake up in cold sweat.

We are in school now! St Thomas's is under monster attack! A dragon-creature lands right smack outside our classroom, sends a couple of cars flying, and starts to blast fire at the nicest vehicles in the immediate vicinity. My classmates go crazy and begin running about, screaming, and quickly I am enveloped in a throng of scared, brainless plebeians who want to get as far away as possible from the monster. I stare at it, and as I am wondering how best to bring it down and kill it my friends start to point at something running helter-smelter right at the monster.

It is my Physics teacher Pn Loh. I am about to shout a warning at her when she stops and rummages in her handbag. The monster turns its fearsome head to look at her; I see its red pupils contract into angry maroon pinpricks. Then - and this is the most improbable thing ever but I swear to you I saw this happen - Pn Loh takes out a plastic star and puts it on her forehead.

And she turns into Ultraman.

I wake up in cold sweat. Exams are not a good time for me to dream in.

Studystack

Been studying 4-5 hours a day, which is torture if it wasn't for a steady stream of good music. The following are a few albums I've been listening to on near constant loop for the past few days. Click on any one of them to listen to download one song from that album ... not the best, but the most listener-friendly.

Note: I'm an alt junkie, so all of the above music are from the alternative genre. Metro Station is the only band you'll hear on Malaysian radio - they're new, relatively unknown, and the lead singer is Miley Cyrus's older brother Trace. Paradoxically, he actually makes decent music.

Why Student Opinion Matters

Anybody submitting a class profile to the Thomian magazine today would find that there are no more class mottoes allowed in the respective class pages. The story behind their exclusion is an illustrative one, and it speaks volumes about what is happening in our schools today. It goes something like this:

Not too long ago, in a Thomian magazine, one student wrote ‘Go to school to get attendance’ as her motto. Perhaps she thought it was witty, perhaps she was being sarcastic, or perhaps it was a stab in the eye of the status quo – we may never be sure. But three things happened.

The first thing was that our Principal noticed. I can only guess at what he was doing when he went over the mottoes in the yearbook ... but there you go. He saw it. The next thing that happened was that he didn’t like what he saw. So he got rid of the mottoes altogether.

What is wrong with this story? I can point out a few things: firstly the banishment of the mottos in the school yearbook based on the actions of one student (no, make that one sentence) is unjustifiable. The girl had a right to her opinion, a right to personal expression within reasonable means – one that the school squashed under the heel of censure. And so what, if her motto swam against the current of conformity? Did the administration honestly think that the motto would single-handedly change the mindsets of the rest of its student population? Did it believe that class mottoes in a yearbook would damage the school’s reputation? And – more importantly – did the principal actually believe this to be reason enough to ban one of the remaining forms of personal expression – however pathetic it may be – in the school yearbook?

The truth is that: yes, it did; yes it thought class mottoes would be damaging; yes, the principal actually thought it reason enough. But don’t get me wrong: I have no problems with a ban on class mottoes in my school’s yearbook. Not by itself. Not with the right reasons. What I do have a problem with, however, is bigger than that: it is the simple fact that not even mottos – the smallest form of personal expression – is allowed in the Thomian. This is sad indeed: if the Thomian school magazine is not for the Thomians, then who is it for? The public? The advertisers? The school’s image?

Let's hold off that question for a little bit. I point now to The Square, which is the school's newsletter for students. It recently put out it’s 160th anniversary edition, a collection of articles then and now, charting the history of a hundred or so years of education. And while compiling features for that issue I ploughed through a stack of Old Thomians to see what things were like a few decades back.

And I couldn't stop reading.

The old Thomian magazines had soul. In the 1960s the students were allowed to write editorials on relevant, modern day issues – there was one about patriotism in the time of the Emergency and it was stark, honest, and wonderfully written. There were House reports too - the captains each had to submit one, and they took the space and the time as to wonder why their Houses did so badly (or so well) on Sports Day that particular year. I remember one Noel captain writing in his report how a lack of spirit after top athletes had left in his House had contributed to their defeat. If that had been written now, in today's St Thomas's, the principal would probably ban the whole section on the grounds of 'school image'.

During his last term as editor of The Square Ravindran had to handle a controversial pullback of every edition of the newsletter. The administration of St Thomas's had struck again: censoring this time an offending article in the center-spread about the state of the Science and Arts streams in the Malaysian education system. The strange thing was that there was nothing wrong with the article. It spoke truth, truth that anybody studying in a Malaysian school could testify to, and the administration pulled it back and removed it on the grounds of 'school image'. Here was the offending paragraph:

Generally, when one leaves secondary three, one is permitted to choose whether to continue their studies in either the science's stream of the art's stream. Unfortunately, the Form 4 arts students in SMK St Thomas do not have a choice. After going through their secondary 3 examination, they are forced to enter the arts stream as if it had been predestined for them. This is because they had failed to excel in their studies, and moreover, to be in the science stream, one has to achieve good grades in English, Mathematics and Science. Apparently, they just do not have the least laudable credentials. Furthermore, most of them belong to the categories that are uninterested in studies.

But here was the context:

On the other hand, lower and upper 6 arts students are a tale of a different story. They enter arts stream through their own choices. They know what they want and exactly how to achieve their targeted goal. One thing is for sure, being in arts stream does not mean they are stupid and being in science stream does not guarantee one's success in life. I truly think that students should not be judged by their intelligence and therefore separated by boundaries created through the particular judgment. Students, in fact, should be looked upon as a whole which are then differentiated by their personal character so that the urge to be arrogant and discriminating against the poor would not be triggered.

The article had struck a chord. It was true that there is a stigma between Arts and Science in Malaysia, one that, if had been recognized, could have been corrected. Singapore was fortunate because it had a visionary Education Minister who recognized the need for an Arts scene, but in Malaysia this perception did not yet exist. The writer, a Form 5 student, could have been encouraged to think critically about matters related to nation and state. But what was the lesson here? What did he learn from this fiasco? What did the administration teach him with censorship?

The lesson was this: the boy learnt that it did not pay to talk, think and speak the truth. It did not pay to voice his opinion, no matter how correct it was. And that it is better in the Malaysian context to sweep current issues under the carpet, to keep silent in fear of 'spoiling the image of the school'.

And I say to this: bollocks. If it seems that St Thomas's is a socialist regime with a censorship board of its own then that is because that it is. In many ways it reflects the current state of Malaysia: we present a idealistic, beautiful face to the world, while the paradoxes of our society stress and strain beneath the surface. The simple truth here is that we cannot hope do become a great nation with the suppression of critical thought and opinion. By extension, we cannot hope to create a dynamic, intelligent youth through the suppression of personal expression. We cannot grow if we cannot speak, and it would do well for our educators to sit up and take notice.

As the editor responsible for the redesign and revamp of The Square I have faced and dealt with many such instances over the last year. Sometimes I relent, because I understand the moral aspect of editorial power. Other times I am stamped out by the censorship board of the school because I stray too near to the truth. The administration complained after the late 2007 revamp that there were not enough reports and too many articles. But the results were telling: before leaving the school last year many Form 5s came up to me and commended our efforts on The Square. To them, it was a far better representation of Thomian life, thought and spirit then the Thomian magazine ever was. The irony wasn't lost on me, nor was it lost on the team - the truth that a small newsletter had beaten the school magazine (which bore the Thomian name) was funny in a very sad way.

You must realize that I do not speak of St Thomas's alone. The suppression of critical opinion is a national problem, created by a Government not fond of press freedom and implemented by Education officers like my principal. When submitting an essay on the effect of inflation my sister had her Kuching High teacher censor all parts mentioning the failure of the 1st Malayan Plan. My sister had merely seeked to prove the effect global prices had on national economic policy; her teacher saw this as 'sensitive' and red inked the whole paragraph. I am sure many such examples exist in our national school system, and it saddens me that my friends and siblings cannot learn to think for themselves.

At the end of the day my class would probably submit a profile without mottoes. It is merely one more sacrifice on the altar of school image and we're used to it. I won't fight for something as small as the inclusion of mottoes, but I will be watching closely the following issues of The Square, as well as further censorship moves the school might or will take.

If it improves, then bravo. But if it doesn't, if the school continues to step in and censor perfectly reasonable opinion, then be certain that you'll hear from me.

Till then.

Note: I edited this article and removed all hints of personal attack after long consideration. I want this to be interpreted as an objective piece, not as a rant, and I believe it is better for it.

Photolog:St Thomas's Pesta Ria

Most of you know by now that when I say photolog on this blog I mean a visual essay. This one is no different: I spent much of Saturday walking around with Stefan's DSLR, shooting left right and centre.

Stefan is one hell of a photographer. The dude got a Nikon D40x right after his SPM and started hanging out with a bunch of camera nuts (read: old men), and they go out for shooting trips every once in awhile. His photos are brilliant. His teaching skills are even better - within a few seconds he covered the basics of aperture, shutter speed and then sent me off to shoot whatever I wanted.

I mean, how cool is that?

An overhead shot of the Pesta Ria from the school hall. Notice the huge space in the middle - runners gathered there earlier for the annual joggerthon.
The clown was a big hit. Pn Eng tells us he's a student in Lower 6 who part-times as a clown. Gotta admire his guts
.
My generation of Thomians.

Fiona and guava. Go figure.

Aidan back from France. He looked at the D40x in my hands and said: "I'm picking up my D60 tonight." Damn.
U6S4's stall.

Some big assed Datuk came, along with a whole host of policemen.

Joanne and hat. David found her cute.

Ball magic.

Ball fiasco.

Ho John giving free rides. He likes attention.