Joanna's Singapore adventures

Exams are a pretty big part of the Singaporean education system. Even at primary school level they get exams that determine their educational future. Given they’ve been doing exams for so long and only the best at doing them are going to get into university, most Singaporean university students seem really good at studying. The library and quiet study rooms get very crowded. Sometimes getting any desk is difficult but the ones near powerpoints for laptop charging are particularly hard to find. Judging by the piles of stuff on some of the study room desks, I suspect some people don’t leave the building for days at a time. It is not at all uncommon to see people asleep in the library or study rooms. You have to watch out for the ones that nap on the floor.

Waiting around for the exam to start can be a bit intimidating. Heaps of people still have their heads deep in the most complicated readings 15 minutes before the exam starts. One thing I noticed in the exams that is different to back home is that very few people finish early. People do that often back home despite the fact that they exams papers require a similar amount of work. Unfortunately for me most of my exams were essay based. One I had successfully guessed on the basis of past exam papers what 2 out of the 3 questions would roughly be so had memorised plans. The other ones were hard work, trying to plan and write essays on huge topics in 40 minutes. It seems a bit absurd that the essays we have to write in 40 minutes in an exam are worth the same as our term papers we spent weeks researching and writing.