DSA 2025

[bbbay]

I set up alert for thread I am keen to follow. Top right hand of each thread is a bell icon. Within it you can select Watching, Not Watching , Ignore. A green dot will appear on your profile icon wherever your watching thread has new post

[zac's mum]

@floppy please share any interesting education-related gossip from XHS! I don’t use scrolly-scrolly apps, even my instagram is dead cos i don’t use Reels

[floppy]

@zac-s-mum

XHS users are usually the new citizens / overseas parents. Hence, more AEIS, iPSLE, DSA centric. Good to understand what is their latest take on our education and how they are gaming it, but not much else.

[bbbay]

In pre tertiary stage education offerings by spore , my view is, in the long run, spore will benefits from opening our doors to foreigners. Never mind about short term benefits we are giving out. Bcos the child may choose to live a different life from the parents when they have grown up. It is the child decision that matter. The child may choose to settle down in spore eventually. And the parents who may want to game the system, nothing they can do about it.

I have heard of a story about a father, educated in Spore, move his family back to China and then New Zealand. Eventually he still decided, for the sake of his young son , to settle back down in Spore, despite his own old parent objection. His old parent prefer NZ’s way of life. But that father thinks NZ slow pace of life will render his young son losing out his edge, in today’s competitive world. China’s society still has its share of inefficient culture.

Today’s foreigner parents may make good use of Spore offers. But it will be their children’s decision where to settle down eventually , not these parents.

[zac's mum]

@floppy i am guessing many are sharing stories on how they successfully gamed math/science dsa lol

[bbbay]

@zac-s-mum

DSA is not considered gaming? It’s base on their ability?

[zac's mum]

@bbbay as with GEP tests, i can guess that somewhere out there, somebody has compiled a list of the common questions & answers, or sold some training programs that claim high success rate. Furthermore, some schools dont conduct tests for DSA but select based on competition results (which selection protocol/criteria is not transparent either).

[doodbug]

@bbbay said in DSA 2025:

In pre tertiary stage education offerings by spore , my view is, in the long run, spore will benefits from opening our doors to foreigners. Never mind about short term benefits we are giving out. Bcos the child may choose to live a different life from the parents when they have grown up. It is the child decision that matter. The child may choose to settle down in spore eventually. And the parents who may want to game the system, nothing they can do about it.

I have heard of a story about a father, educated in Spore, move his family back to China and then New Zealand. Eventually he still decided, for the sake of his young son , to settle back down in Spore, despite his own old parent objection. His old parent prefer NZ’s way of life. But that father thinks NZ slow pace of life will render his young son losing out his edge, in today’s competitive world. China’s society still has its share of inefficient culture.

Today’s foreigner parents may make good use of Spore offers. But it will be their children’s decision where to settle down eventually , not these parents.

I’m not sure what you mean by opening doors. Do you mean take in more AEIS or award more scholarships? We cannot discount the ill-sentiments felt especially by boys when their AEIS and scholarship peers do not have to serve NS and are two or sometimes 2.5 years ahead. MOE already spreads the scholars and AEIS kids across schools - the AEIS kids are paying substantial school fees - perhaps the Singapore student population can accept and absorb more of them, but I’m not sure how much more appetite the population has for increasing the scholar pool much further.

The sentiments are possibly exacerbated at the university level because the scholars don’t serve NS, and the number of Singaporeans getting full scholarships and/or bursaries is not that large. Many Singaporeans have to take tuition fee loans from parents’ CPF etc and that is counted as financial aid. Unless you are in the bottom 10 or 20th percentile of household income, I hardly hear of financial aid covering full tuition fees and living allowances for Singaporeans - I would be happy to stand corrected on this.

[bbbay]

This post is deleted!

[bbbay]

@zac-s-mum said in DSA 2025:

@bbbay as with GEP tests, i can guess that somewhere out there, somebody has compiled a list of the common questions & answers, or sold some training programs that claim high success rate. Furthermore, some schools dont conduct tests for DSA but select based on competition results (which selection protocol/criteria is not transparent either).

Actually I think in some aspects, these parents are contributing to our education system. In a hackerton event, hackers are invited to hack an organisation system. The winner will be rewarded and the organisation get to know their system vulnerabilities and then fix them. And their system will be more resilient. Previous GEP is an example where MOE ended it after learning the selection questions could be pre learnt.

DSA has many domains. Each has different selection process. Leadership selection has to see consistent portfolio and undergo interviews. Such requirements are not so easy to game. Other academics DSA criteria of international Olympian medals I think are also not easy to hack an achievement by memorising questions. There may be few have successfully gamed the system out of good luck, but I don’t think it a system wide spread prevailing problem now. During NUS open house a staff from the scholarship team shared with me, best the child answered scholarship application question truefully. If child give a memorised answers the selector would know it because they have heard such answers many times before.