Focus on the students

Today's papers talk about the alumnis in the Singapore universities and how they are not giving back to the university in terms of donations.

I think the so-called Singapore "world class" universities need to do an internal review of why this is happening. For me, I'm proud to say I'm from a certain Polytechnic here. But I never mention I'm from which university.

Why? Very simple... Because the teaching sucks.

The teachers I have in my Polytechnic make a special effort to help us understand certain concepts and theories. Up to now, I remember some of my lecturer's names from my polytechnic (almost 10 years).

In our "world-class" university, its totally different. Even now, I can hear complaints from the current university undergrads that they totally do not understand what the lecturer was saying for the whole duration of the lecture. The lecturer was like carrying on a monologue with him/herself.

My personal experience is that there are 3 major problems with the teaching standard in the local university now:

1. We totally do not understand some of the lecturer's English
2. The lecturer just read word for word from the slides for the duration of the lecture. The slides are just summaries from the textbook.
   
3. If you ask a question during lecture, they'll ask you to refer to the textbook, pg xx.

That's the standard I faced when I was in the local university, and I heard that its still the same. There were only a handful (< 5) of lecturers back in my time who bother to go the extra mile to inject something special into their lectures.

The local universities have to understand that we pay them to teach us, not to ask us to refer to so and so textbook without an explanation on what it means. You can have so many medals, so many papers under your names, but its totally useless if you cannot teach us that knowledge.

Even now, you can hear complaints from some students that it seems that their final year project is to further some pet project that the lecturer is doing, and its totally not related to what they really want to research into.

Re-focus on the students... If we're made to feel that we matters, we'll automatically give back to the university.

The answer is just so simple. You do not need to be a university graduate to figure that out.