Just want to state my observations on a certain DSA sports trial. My kid was notified to participate in a selection for one top school less than 3 working days from the date of trial. On that day, the turnout was quite huge for that sport, so my first thought was that all applicants were made to attend. This is good in my opinion, that everybody gets the chance. But it also means that the achievement records which applicants had submitted were likely not reviewed yet since there was no pre-trial shortlist. The more disturbing point was that shortlisting for post-trial interview seems to be based on the student’s performance in the trial rather than viewed as a whole with past achievement records. Why I’m saying this is that immediately after the trial, the teacher-in-charge told the students that shortlist results would be out the next day. So fast?!

For all I know, other schools take some weeks to finalize the shortlist and I expect there would be a lot of pondering over trial performance, academic results, achievement records etc before a student would be selected for the interview. With so many attendees, if the shortlist can be out so fast, it makes me wonder if the teacher really had time to go thru all records. Further, somehow during the trial, we parents had an opportunity to peek at the happenings within the venue. So we could literally see (from facial expressions and body language), which student was given a “stamp of approval” from the coach. The coach’s assessment seemed to play a great part then. So is this even fair, that an outsourced coach appeared to have a more crucial say in the outcome? How do we know if a selected candidate isn’t already a student of that coach or is somehow already familiar to him/her. Another point I would like to bring up is that on the next day that the interview shortlist was out, the trial was not even completed. Some students who couldn’t make it for the first day were still pending trial on the second day, which is 1 day after the shortlist was released. Again, is this even fair for those who did trial at a later date?
Overall the whole exercise gave me the impression that it was shoddily conducted and made me question whether it was an impartial process.
I could be wrong but I can’t help feeling this way because of the way it was conducted.