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Channel NewsAsia - 1 hour 43 minutes ago
87.5% A—level students pass under revised curriculum
SINGAPORE: The GCE A—level examination results are out and students have scored almost as well as the previous batch, despite a new curriculum.
Last year was also the first time that students from the Integrated Programme (IP) sat for the Cambridge examinations.
Top student Ian Wee is well on his way to becoming a clinician scientist in neurobiology.
The IP student from Hwa Chong Institution (HCI) scored a total of nine distinctions and his project on proteins is awaiting publication in an international scientific journal.
Ian is one of 1,660 IP students who got their results on Friday. The other two IP schools whose students sat for last year’s Cambridge papers are National Junior College (NJC) and Raffles Junior College (RJC).
IP students at Temasek Junior College and Victoria Junior College, which offered the programme from 2005, will sit for their A—level exams this year.
Having skipped the O—levels, IP students had their first taste of the Cambridge exam at the A—levels. This year’s A—level cohort is also the first batch to go through a new curriculum.
There is now a bigger emphasis on independent learning, project work and inter—disciplinary subjects.
In this respect, some might say that IP students have an advantage over the rest of the cohort. But educators said it is not necessarily true because for several years now, the entire education system has been moving towards ’teach less, learn more’.
Indeed, the Education Ministry (MOE) said where broad comparisons can be made with the old syllabus, performance across the level is similar to last year’s results.
According to MOE figures, 87.5 percent or 11,418 of 13,053 students who sat for the exams last year obtained three Higher—2 (H2) passes and a pass in General Paper (GP) or Knowledge and Inquiry a new inter—disciplinary paper.
90.1 percent of the students got at least two H2 and two H1 passes.
Last year, 88.2 percent had three A—level passes and a pass in GP, while 91.1 percent scored at least two A2 and two AO passes, including GP.
On the whole, IP students have fared as well as the others.
While RJC declined to make comparisons, HCI said its students, who have all gone through part of the Integrated Programme, have performed better than their seniors.
Over at NJC, where nearly one in four students are in the IP, about half of them scored at least three distinctions, comparable to last year’s batch.
But Ian feels that in some subjects, IP students like him have the edge.
"A lot of my friends tell me that the Integrated Programme helps when you do Knowledge and Inquiry because of the space that the IP system gives you to discover more about yourself and to do the sort of reflection that I think is quite essential to such a philosophical subject," he said.
Over at Anglo—Chinese Junior College, it was a moment to savour for Su Peng Tian, who has overcome a two—year battle with cancer to score two As and two Bs.
He now wants to pursue medicine at university.
"Being a long—term patient, it helps me to experience, to see more of what a patient and doctor’s relationship is, and what both sides need from each other," said Peng Tian. — CNA/so
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i guess not many ppl have done well in As la. =( my school not many ppl get full distinctions. so yeah. haha.
for me, i din do well. so do my class. when we received our results, there were no tears of joy or sorrow, we just stood there aimlessly, dunno which path to take.
the only jcs i heard did very well are hci and rj. is that true?
Edited by maxtonian 09 Mar `08, 6:17PM
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