06 August 2019

Ms Shermaine Ang was recently awarded the Singapore Police Force Scholarship (SPFS), one of the most prestigious scholarships awarded by the Public Service Commission.

The SPFS was first awarded in 1979, and this year marks the first time that a female applicant has been successful in securing the scholarship.

The other three recipients of the SPFS are Mr Justin Quek, and Mr Warren Liow, both from Raffles Institution, as well as Mr Yiik Chia from HCI.

These students are among 23 recipients of various scholarships recently given out by the Ministry of Home Affairs at a ceremony in the Istana.

Minister for Home Affairs and Law K. Shanmugam, who was the guest of honour of the MHA scholarship award ceremony, noted that more students were interested in a Home Team career this year compared to previous years.

Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen had said in July that applications for defence scholarships hit an all-time high of about 1,700 this year.

26 July 2019

Singapore’s universities and polytechnics will increase efforts to train people in emerging skills such as machine learning and data analytics, in order to equip the workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0.

Speaking at the annual SkillsFuture Festival, Mr Chee Hong Tat, Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Education, said that Industry 4.0 is not about replacing existing workers with machines or new workers, but the training of existing workers to use new technologies.

The National University of Singapore will play its role by starting a new Master of Science in Industry 4.0 next month to help workers keep pace with digital advances. The new programme will cover areas such as data analytics, digital infrastructure and transformation systems, and include an industrial attachment.

Singapore’s institutes of higher learning will continue to work with each other to develop “stackable” modular courses in Industry 4.0. An example of such a programme would be NUS’ Institute of Systems Science’s partnership with Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic to allow modules from the polytechnics’ post-diploma programmes to be counted towards a Master of Technology at NUS.

19 July 2019

Nine of this year’s 93 Public Service Commission (PSC) scholarship recipients are polytechnic graduates. This represents a significant increase in the number of polytechnic graduates being awarded the prestigious PSC scholarship.

In the past two years, only a single scholarship each year went to someone from the polytechnics, while in 2016, only three polytechnic students were awarded the scholarship.

Additionally, the PSC scholarship award recipients this year come from 17 different schools, including three from Singapore’s newest junior college, Eunoia, set up in 2017.

PSC chairman Lee Tzu Yang said that the commission looks beyond “smarts” for qualities like integrity, dedication to service and excellence.

The commission is also looking to use game-based assessment to assess aptitude and personality traits.

Mr Lee said: “By understanding the behaviour of candidates under different circumstances, we will be better able not just to understand individuals but also build teams… And we will continue to look for ways to widen the selection process.”

18 July 2019

Education Minister Ong Ye Kung recently announced at a work-learn carnival at Nanyang Polytechnic that existing work-study programmes at Singapore’s universities and polytechnics will be expanded.

The Nanyang Technological University will offer six new work-study degrees in areas such as engineering, data science and business analytics in the new academic year for 2019.

Currently, the local universities offer 16 work-study degree programmes.

The polytechnics will roll out another 15 new Earn and Learn programmes (ELP), while the Institute of Technical Education is adding more work-learn technical diploma programmes, which are also a form of ELP, to its current slate of 14.

Students will be selected yearly for the programme after interviews with the universities and employers, and need to maintain an academic grade point average to continue in the programme.

15 July 2019

A new “through-train” programme will be implemented in Singapore’s polytechnics to allow students to get a place in a local university, and also be assured of a job.

Under this scheme, students will also graduate from university up to a year earlier than their peers. This is the first such programme in Singapore that gives full-time diploma students a guaranteed route to a degree.

As an example of an implementation of this programme, Temasek Polytechnic has tied up with the Singapore University of Social Sciences and the Singapore Institute of Technology to offer this new pathway in April next year for 40 students in the building services and mechatronics sectors.

Students in TP’s mechatronics diploma will go on to study SIT’s bachelor of engineering in mechanical design and manufacturing engineering, while those in TP’s integrated facility management or green building and sustainability course may move on to SUSS’ bachelor of science in facilities management.

These students will take three or more university modules in their third year of polytechnic, go on an internship with their sponsoring companies, and graduate with a diploma.

During their undergraduate years, they will study and work concurrently for the company, and after graduation will return as full-time employees.

09 July 2019

Starting from the year 2021, the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) will attempt to assess creative thinking ability and global competency in students.

The organisation headquartered in Paris has defined global competence as “the capacity to examine global and inter-cultural issues, to take multiple perspectives, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development”.

Students will be assessed on these skills as follows:

In the first part, students will read about a case study, and respond to questions that evaluate their capacity to understand the complexity of the case, the multiple perspectives of the diverse actors involved, and suggest solutions.

This will be followed by a questionnaire to gauge their openness towards people from other cultures, respect for cultural otherness, global-mindedness and responsibility.

Teachers and school heads will also be given a questionnaire which aims to provide a comparative picture of how education systems are integrating global, international and inter-cultural perspectives through the curriculum and other activities.

Pisa believes that it is important to nurture the capacity of students to look at the world through different lenses and perspectives, appreciate different ways of thinking and different cultures.

Education has always been the way to pass down knowledge, skills, values and culture to enable subsequent generations to thrive. Educators, as well as parents, need to foster a fuller range of skills, including creative thinking and global competency, to enable young people to adapt and thrive in this rapidly changing world.

03 July 2019

In this year’s Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Top 50 Under 50 league rankings, Nanyang Technological University has been ranked the world’s best young university for the sixth straight year.

NTU’s biggest improvements were in the areas of academic reputation, research citations per faculty and employer reputation.

QS research director Ben Sowter said NTU has “catapulted its way to the top tier of global higher education”, adding: “NTU has been bolstered by strong support from the Singaporean Government, who are reaping the rewards of recognising the value of concerted research investment and international faculty recruitment.”

Last month, NTU was ranked joint-11th with the National University of Singapore in the QS World University Rankings.

30 June 2019

The recently published Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings showed that the efforts of the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University in furthering research and education excellence are gradually being recognised.

NTU received higher scores than NUS in faculty-to-student ratio and citations per faculty, an indicator of institutional research impact. However, NUS is more well-known among academics and employers than NTU, staying at 11th in the world for academic reputation with a score of 99.8, based on responses from over 94,000 academics.

An NTU spokesman said that along with the appointment of Professor Subra Suresh as president in January last year, the new leadership team has overseen the hiring of top talent in the past one and a half years.

For instance, the Presidential Post-doctoral Fellowship programme, started last year, attracted applications from nearly 900 young people from top global institutions for 12 positions this year.

An NUS spokesman said: “We are honoured that many academics and employers around the world continue to regard NUS as among the best in Asia and globally… The remarkable global standing of our local universities attests to the quality of Singapore’s higher education system.”