27th September 2005 Tuesday

I am getting increasingly disappointed with University life with each passing day. When I first started University, I had no idea that this will be the life that I will be leading. Let's start with the difficulty in making real good friends over there. I guess it is largely due to the school system. We get to choose our classes every semester which is largely on a first come first served basis. True that such a system gives us flexibility in planning our schedule. However, in such a way, you tend to get different people around you for every class that you have, not to mention that many don't even bother to turn up for lessons. In such a way, it is really hard to have friends consistently with you for every module. This makes the friendship building process difficult and it also means you are practically on your own most of the time. Some might argue that friendship could be built up through groupwork. But I will view such friends to be like a one semester thing. The friendship thus built up will usually be eroded during the holidays following the semester end and it will probably be dead by the following semester as everyone gets into different groups again for different modules and different projects. Admit it or not, it happens. I really do want to keep the friends that I find so fun to talk and work with but well, I would describe this with an analogy of Cinder's, doing so is like holding on to sand, the harder you try to hold on, the more falls out of you palm.

Another disappointing thing about my University experience is probably the groupwork system. True that it indeed opened up my world to a whole lot of different people and a whole lot of different view point, not to mention the amount of stuff I got to learn from my group mates. However, when you get into the same group with a whole lot of irresponsible people, it is really taxing and irritating. I will not elaborate much on this as such feelings are really beyond words. Those of you who have been in really lousy groups should know what I mean. When I mean lousy, I don't mean people who has insufficient knowledge or stuff, I mean lousy in the sense that they are irresponsible, do not keep to time, expects the whole group to act for his or her convenience and simply refuse to put in effort for the whole project.

Another thing to complain about it probably the quality of some of the lecturers. Some of the lecturers that I had were really marvellous but some are so lousy that maybe even we could lecture better than them. I seriously do not blame people from refusing to go for lectures under such circumstances. You probably could value add more by skipping lectures and doing something more worthwhile, like one of those never ending projects. Well, isn't that what we were taught in economics? People choose activites considering cost and benefits. So it is just a real life application of that. The lecturer can't blame us for utilizing what we were taught right?

The last thing I got to complain about the inability of the assessment system to measure what we know as well as the effort we put in. Let's take class participation as an example. Most tutors probably based class participation on class attendance and class attendance are practically taken by passing the attendance sheet around. This simply means that signatures could be forged or someone could arrive for half the lessons and still gets a whole lesson attendance marked. In addition, whoever did say class participation was equal to class attendance? Couldn't I attend a lesson and sleep in class? So I did participate by sleeping? You might argue that some tutors do take what you speak up in class as a gauge for class participation. But if they do that, you will find loads of people speaking up for the sake of speaking up, even to the extent of asking nonsensical questions just to make an impression on the tutor. But do you seriously think that a tutor having so many different classes and so many different students in every class can remember each and everyone of us, including what we said and not say? You must be mad to assume that. Another inadequacy in the grading system is taking group work into account. Do you seriously think the end result of a group work is indicative of what each and every one in the group know and how much effort each and every one in the group puts in? You must be crazy to think that.

Hiaz. In summary, only one word to describe what I meant to say today and that is "disappointment". The ideal world is but a dream that never does exist in real life.