Paper 3

Poor mama, couldn’t understand why she responded with “又是面？” when I said I wanted to have noodles for dinner. Ohhh…just realised that I had the exact same thing on Monday… =P

In NTU, you arrive at least 15 minutes before the exam, go to allocated seats, the standard papers are already on your desk, and you cannot leave within the last 15 minutes of the paper.

Oh…and you get instructions and marks allocation on each question paper too.

The instructions here are in Chinese (duh…), and for the past two papers, I haven’t had sufficient time to finish reading them. Tonight, I was glad the teacher read it out. There was something about placing your identification on the table and leaving personal belongings at a designated spot. I have come to understand that these are merely “in theory”.

Before the papers got passed down, the teacher warned us not write more than 300 words for each answer. He said we shouldn’t beat around the bush, we ought to get to the point, and it’d make things easier for us and for him. Excellent…The last time I had a maximum word limit was for GP Summary!

One hour into the exam, and with one more hour to go, the guy behind me packed up, handed in his paper and left. In the next half an hour, more than half the class did the same. With every word and sentence I added, I imagined the teacher frowning at me…Can you believe it, stressssssed cos I thought I was writing too much…

I left 5 minutes before the end of the paper, DEJECTED. Five questions with no marks allocation. First question asked for the names of countries in traditional Southeast Asia. Traditional??? The last question was interesting. I thought! I used my mind! What are some factors that can negatively affect relations between China and SEA? If I weren’t expected to think, but instead copy from notes (I really didn’t come across any related ones), then I cham le…

I wanna say that I’m halfway through the exams, with three papers down and three more to go, but my News Writing take-home examination came in today. Two pieces of hard news by next Friday. Suddenly, I felt very lost. At least Vandana told us to write about food in our basic media writing class. For this examination, any topics will do. Why am I not enjoying this freedom? Have I been “trained” to follow top-down “orders”?

That brings me to another incident today. Miss Wang, a pretty fourth-year journalism student who’s headed for her Masters in Media Policies in Columbia Univ, posed these questions to me. “Do all Singaporeans like Lee Kuan Yew?” To which I answered that most have a deep admiration for him. Then, she followed with, “What about his son, Lee Hsien Long?” This isn’t the first time that I receive such questions from locals here. Now they not only think that one gets caned for spitting in Singapore, our government has become a Lee empire.

So peeps, what do you think of our third PM?

What got me thinking was how I answered Wang. I confidently said that PM Lee had proven himself capable. She was seemingly satisfied, but I wasn’t! How has he proven himself capable??? Will time tell or have I been blinded to exhibitions of his capability?

gRacE =)