Letter to Straits Times Forum sent on April 25th, 2008. Probably not going to be published.
I read Ms Jane Ng’s report and analysis on Project Work with great interest.
Much has been said about doing more to ensure consistency in its grading across different schools, and I agree with that. The Ministry needs to do more than to merely assert that Project Work “has stood up to rigourous consistency”—since that is exactly what the public does not believe in for years now.
But what surprises me is this mindset that schools that are “academically strong” must excel equally in Project Work—an assumption perpetuated in Ms Ng’s analysis (“Their rankings may not come as a surprise as…”), and which seems to be the cause of all this disgruntlement.
Students and their parents from these “elite schools” find it incredulous that students from a “neighbourhood school” such as Yishun Junior College could be on par—or even better than them in Project Work.
But Project Work is inherently different from the traditional, content-based subjects that students here are used to doing well in. The Ministry had introduced Project Work, as we are told, to shift the emphasis away from rote-learning and to better equip students with skills for the new economy.
It would thus be alarming if the results of Project Work were to mirror exactly the grades that students are currently getting for their content-based subjects— for the skills needed to do well in either are entirely different.
Beyond reeking of elitism and discrediting the hard work put in by these “neighbourhood school” students who have done well in Project Work, the assumption that a student who does well in Chemistry or History must surely do as well in Project Work is a non-sequitur.
I thought there were plenty of other letters complaining to the Ministry about the low number of distinctions given out to students outside the top few JCs? I always thought the end result did mirror the traditional ones which formed the basis of complaint for most of the parents. In anycase, this is rather pointless to discuss because I heard the project work is going to be terminated as of next year. =)
Hey Yiren,
I haven’t come across any letter complaining about the low number of distinctions given to ‘neighbourhood’ students. On the contrary, the complaints about Project Work seems to be fuelled only by a group of ‘elite’ students and their parents unsatisfied that they not doing better than the ‘neighbourhood’ peers—and the assumption of elite-should-do-better-than-neighbourhood further perpetuated by the ST writer—hence the basis of my letter.