About Cheating

Let’s talk about my mid term tests that just ended less than a week ago. And no, I am not going to whine about how difficult these tests were, neither am I going to brag about how well I did. I am just going to talk about the issue of cheating. Oh no no, its not a big issue, we see it in every single test, be it starting earlier, turning to the neighbors for answers, blatantly discussing with each other while the paper is being collected or refusing to stop writing after the time is up. I just cannot hide my disgust when I see such happenings around and it occurred in every single test that I have taken.

Someone told me this before:

“Hey look, your future employer will not be concern with how you attain your grades; they are only interested in that first class honors. So who cares if you did it through cheating? The point is to get the good grades through whatever means available. When there is a chance to better my score, I will grab it. Who cares about integrity?”

Oh yea, I must be so damn dumb to advocate this uprightness. I am so stupid not to start earlier when I have the chance since the invigilators are not watching anyway. Oh yes, even starting a few seconds earlier is going to give me a hell lots of advantage. And I should not hesitate to ask my neighbors if I dunno how to do some questions, making wonderfully beautiful sounds so pleasant to the ears to attract his attention. I will be so satisfied with myself when I finally pissed my neighbor off who eventually show me the answers. Moreover, I must be really dumb not to peek at the person in front of me at the LT exam venues to see which ovals he shaded. And at the end of the day be really really please with myself for getting a high score by doing so. And not forgetting, I must not listen to the invigilators when they tell us to stop writing. After all, there is still some time when they get to me, I could still figure out this problem and get at least ONE mark more. Hey ONE mark is very important, I am so sure it can bring my grade from C to A ok? Furthermore, I should have kept a lookout for my friends’ location so that I can SHOUT out loud to ask them for the answers before the invigilators get to me so that I can change them. To make it less obvious we will communicate in some foreign language which most dun understand so that people will think that we are merely chatting away. Oh yeah, chatting while the invigilators are collecting the papers is perfectly alright here in nus. And finally, 10 years down the road when I look back at my uni days, I will be so enormously proud of myself for achieving impressive grades through such devious means.

On a serious note, I do not see the point in cheating that few marks, gaining that slight advantage and above all annoying all the people around them who are trying to uphold this honesty. Yet, there will be some people with the mentality as the above quote, accusing people like me of not being able to see the big picture. It’s a fucking practical world, they say, it’s just the good grades that matters, what integrity? Yea, perhaps I dun get it, but certainly life is not just a rat race, there is more to it. I just hope I am not alone in fighting for what is morally right.

Happy Valentine’s Day

A recent article in E-mag, the official magazine for the engineering club, presented several ways on how a single can spend his/her valentine’s day. Of all the 10 tips mentioned, I am most agreeable on the point on “making someone happy” and as I mentioned to some of my friends reading the article with me, I shall do that on Valentine’s Day. However, when my friend asked me early this morning on what I have done to brighten up someone’s life, I was stunned, as I did not even realize today was V-day and treated today like any other normal day, well which I ought to, considering there’s nothing for me to celebrate about. Or is it?

This special day is the celebration of love, not limiting only to boy-girl relationships type of romantic love or committed love but also extended to family love, friendships and even loves for all fellow human beings in general.

Here are 10 things which I did on this special occasion:

1) Wishing all the people that matters to me most a very happy valentine’s day.

- (OAC adventurers): Liu Ting, Xiao Yun, Menghui, Nguan Teck, Kent, Jun An, Wei wen.

- (3^rd Guards warriors): Yi Cai, Jian Cheng, Jing Xi, Chang Tai, Wei heng, Tim, Jevon, Eng kiat, Kang Rui, Jian Yu and more.

- (NUS mugineers): Chu Wen, Zhi Guo aka NinjaZG aka The Wuss, Jeremy, Mitch, Christopher, Yew Jack, etc.

- (NY 01s2a fighters): Jia Hao, Druce, Chin Wei, Tnt, Danny.

Happy Valentine’s to all of you and cheers to our friendships!

2) Watching other couples cuddling together so intimately, flowers & gifts everywhere, couples holding hands everywhere, and what have you, while at the back of my mind trying very hard to convince myself the advantages of singlehood. (read further below on msn chat, point number 8)

3)Queue up with my classmates to collect this free bottle from the engine club welfare giveaway thingy. Queue was long so we chatted and had fun; talking about anything else other than the mundane and stressful school life.

4) Make someone happy: Helped an elderly couple figured out and get to their destination as they could not understand English. They were so grateful and kept thanking me as they were rather lost before my help. On seeing that, it actually brightens up my day. It’s indeed really true that one will feel happy at the though that someone is happy because of you.

5) Make someone happy: Helped my dad to settle our long overdue electrical and telephone bills, amounting to around 200 bucks.

6) Make someone happy: Treated my mom to some chocolates and telling her that I love her.

7) Make time and have dinner with my family and chatted with them longer than I would have usually done, asking them how was their day, work/school, and stuff like that.

8) Chat with a friend (read: another lonely heart) over the msn. Initially the conversation circled around the topic of how to get out of this single status. This eventually turned into a session on convincing each other on the benefits of being single. Well, of course the main advantage which we both agreed on would be freedom and that singles will have more time for themselves, no need to put up with unreasonable expectations of partners and the likes. Ok... these are what dumb singles like us do on v-day when there is no dates to speak of, lurking around the chat room in search of lonely souls like ourselves...

9) Mug. What do you expect? Term test is coming up in just a couple of days and I am still rather unsure about certain concepts in physics and economics. Being a typical mugineer, my day after school became a passionate rush for knowledge on how the electrical and magnetic field relates to the charge acting on it and be enormously inspired by the amazing equation created by Ampere & Maxwell, even a song was written to honor their discoveries wor.

10) Blogging. I think I am so fucked. Term test is just a couple of days away and I still can afford to waste time to blog and surf around. What to do? Undoubtedly, life is hard, but there should always be a time to relax and do things that I really wana do, although this time variable will very very soon decrease exponentially, becoming asymptotic to time = 0 and eventually reaches zero nearer to the final's.

Stress

A friend of mine took a test on the module “electrical engineering” yesterday and exclaimed his astonishment of how easy the test was. Sometime back, I kinda gave him the mentality that the paper will be a race against time, which was the case last semester, all questions were manageable and it’s just a matter of whether you have time to finish all of them. Hence, he did rush through it only to realize that by the 35^th min, he had reached the end of the paper. Following which, he took his time to flip back and check his solutions where most of them were just simple few steps answers. 15 mins went by and he was done with the first round of checking. Therefore, he went through it a second round while having the notion that he might not get full marks due to a possible deduction of 1 mark in view of his untidiness. He wasn't the only one who think the paper was easy, most of his friends had similar experience.

One should be happy with such easy paper or should we? What is the point if everyone achieve a high percentage of the score when at the end of the day, we are still going to be graded based on a bell curve? Ultimately, it boils down to how careful you are. One careless mistake will render you a poor position on the curve and thus poor grade. Is this a test of your carefulness or your concepts of the subject?

Furthermore, an easy paper could give us a wrong impression on our grades. Our judgment on the “feel” of the paper is no longer accurate. One might expect an A from the paper as he/she understood all the concepts and find most questions manageable. Yet, that person might get a B+ instead, for example, not because he/she do not fully understand the module, but losing to the competitiveness instead. I shudder at such thoughts.

A difficult paper, on the contrary, would serve more purpose than that of an easy paper. Instead of a test of your carefulness, a difficult paper can successfully differentiate the better students from the average and the average from the weaker ones. Yet, such papers could be very demoralizing.

Either case, it’s going to be stressful experience. As a matter of fact, examinations have always been stressful as everything depends on them. From young, we had been given the notion that examinations are all that we should be concern with as so much depends on them. Right here in nus engine fac, where competition is so high, there is no room for failures at all, else one would see the cap score dipping. There is no joy at all, it’s a chore. Something important is absent; the fun of learning, the enthusiasm in learning, these factors are all missing from the equation of learning. It is just simply preparation for examinations after examinations.