It's exam week here at NUS and I should be studying. But it's Saturday morning and I can't bring myself to right at this moment. Maybe after writing this entry, I will get cracking.

A lot of people ask me how different the schooling systems between Singapore and Canada. I suppose in particular, all I can answer to are NUS versus UW.

On the whole, I think typically once you reach the university level in any prestigious university, things are fairly similar at the end of the day. That said though, there are some differences between NUS' way of doing things compared to UW's way of doing things. And with respect to these, I like UW better.

First and probably most obvious is the aspect of competition. Perhaps it's a Singaporean thing in general, but NUS' marking scheme is all about competition. There are only a fixed number of A's and B's to go around. So in a nutshell, how the grading typically works is that a small top percentage of the class will receive A's, followed by B's, and then C's and D's. So you got a 95% on your Control Systems exam? Good for you. Everyone else got 99% - therefore you might end up with a C, or B at best.

In some ways, this is reflective of the real world. But it creates in me a sense of uneasiness, in that my best is never good enough. It also tends to create some nasty behaviours in students. According to one article in NUS' student publication, The Ridge, students have often been known to purposely misplace and hide library books such that their peers will not be able to find the necessary resources they will need to complete their assignments.

I admit that I even felt a bit questionable of my "niceness" towards other students. For example, in our EE2001 project, a couple of students from other groups were interested in my strain gauge instrumentation circuit. So being the friendly classmate I am, I gave them a bit of insight into what I had done. In general, this is a nice thing to do. But for the betterment of my grade in the class, it would have been more "politically correct" to not divulge any details about my work, or perhaps even give them incorrect information all together (so as to waste their time). On another occasion, another classmate in a different group was having difficulty in rigging up their RF transmitter/receiver circuit (which I had already spent considerable amount of time perfecting for our group's hardware). Again being the relatively friendly person I am, I gave the other group a helping hand by debugging some of their problems.

I don't know if the sentiment that "we're all in this together" is one that all the NUS students share? I know that it's often one that UW engineering students share. But if the performance of your peer directly and severely affects your own performance, that sentiment may dissolve completely.

The second difference I not after completing the majority of the course work seems to be the focus of the course material. I now feel that UW SYDE profs are of particularly high quality. This is not to say that NUS profs are bad. Only, I feel that the methods of teaching and the focuses of UW SYDE profs are better than those of the NUS engineering profs I've had so far.

It seems so far that most of the course material here focuses on a heavy amount of theory and "know how to." That is, there is heavy emphasis on being able to take a question and get an answer. A lot of emphasis on the final answer. This is not bad, and no doubt UW engineering has a certain degree of this as well. But what is missing I find is often the bigger picture. Some profs do manage to incorporate this, but I don't see this on as large and integrated of a scale that UW SYDE profs are able to pull off.

That is to say, UW SYDE seems to focus a lot of application of techniques rather than just the techniques themselves.

For example, a UW signals and systems course assignment question might be: given that a patient has hearing loss at this particular frequency, design a filter to correct this with a certain specified gain.

An NUS question might instead be: design a filter with the following cut-off frequencies.

At the end of the day, the questions will have the student churn out the same result. But the UW question has more depth, having the student design something based on a perceived need, rather than some numbers on paper.

Either way, I think I need to cut this deliberation short and get started on studying.