Term 2...

Well...its been a long time since I posted up anything...


The truth is, I did not select LA as term 2 ACE choice. That is why I did not bother to blog.


To be honest, not only myself, but others too will only blog if they needed the ACE. This brings out a point that is so common in HCI, students only take initiative if they see that they can be awarded credit points, and not because they want to enhance their knowledge of things outside curriculum.


If you ask any student why projects day is important, he will most likely say this : " It is because projects day is 50% of my ACE subject for the whole year."

I mean, the school has implemented projects day in order to get students to learn things that are not taught in class, and through these projects, the students are also able to grasp leadership skills and also learn how to be a team worker. But in the eyes of the students, it is a source of burden and they will just treat as any assignment that is given out by teachers for them to complete, for them to present it to their fellow students. But this particular "assignment" has a lethal feature that forces every student to regard it as a do-well-or-die thing, and that lethal feature, is ACE.

With the projects day being 50% of the ACE subject for the whole year, it gives a feeling to the students that it is a torture that they must go through in order to carry on being in the current IP program. Students tend to go crazy over projects day, for they fear the fact that if they screw up the project, it will greatly affect their end of year ACE results, which is one of the deciding factors for what stream they get into, and nobody wants to end up in a O level class.

But I fear not projects day, but I fear this whole credit system the school have created, both ACE and OP. Ever since it was decided that ACE and OP will be individual subjects which are part of the end of year results, I, along with many students, have our burdens and worries increased a lot. When we first heard of this change, we were all shocked and worried. What the school did was a horrible thing. Before the decision of making ACE and OP into subjects, we already had a hard time coping with the amount of work needed to be done in order to get higher ACE and OP points. Now that they have become 2 important subjects that affects our streaming, it has made students change their learning attitude.

If you observe carefully in class, many students are beginning to vigorously ask questions and answer questions in class, to a certain extent that they go crazy whenever the teacher asks a question. An example would be my class : During chinese lessons, whenever the teacher asks a student to read a certain paragraph or answer a question, almost the entire class will in a blink of an eye raise their hand up, vying for the chance to speak up in class, leaving those quiet ones there to await the teacher to hand pick them to speak out. All these insanity just in order to get OP points.

An example for ACE would be class assignments. Whenever a teacher asks the class to do a certain activity, the first question that instantly pops out in the student's head : "Is there any ACE points?" It is like as if the students will only work hard for assignments if the assignment included ACE points. If you tell a student to give you a report which have no ACE points to be given to him, he will give you a half hearted and filled with many errors report. However if you tell him that there is ACE points to be awarded, you will receive a well written report. This shows that the current credit system has turned hwa chong students into points seeking humans, who only does things well if it had points to be awarded.

The whole point of ACE and OP was to get the students to learn better in class, but what it does is to make students become so obsessed with points that only credit points will attract them to do anything. Be it easy or difficult, as long as there is credit points are awarded, students will be willing to do it.

In conclusion, the whole credit system in HCI is causing students to adopt a wrong attitude towards learning, if the school wants the students to have the right learning attitude, it will have to come up with something better than the current credit system. I personally wish that there no such thing as ACE and OP... and also projects day, which I have not prepared yet...