Melodies, i may not have been clear. It is the case if you have accepted another dsa offer

My son was in GEP. The DSA experience was very quite stressful for us. We didn’t know he needed 80% to have to avoid the GAT test or that HMT was a plus for some schools (which he didn’t have). We did not feel we had any advantage to other students during the dsa. Compared to the GEP or non-GEP students who had glowing academic grades, competition results, excellent cca etc, during the process, we thought we did not do good enough by him to help him get that kind of trackrecord. He made it through the dsa for one school based on his entry test results, was waitlisted on another. A number of his classmates in GEP received rejections. We learnt our lesson the hard way - that the system is entirely based on merit. It doesn’t matter if you are in GEP or not, the schools we applied to selected entirely on merit. When he entered the school in sec1, there were many non-GEP boys with excellent results in the school, many better than him. At most there were only a handful of gep boys and boys who came in under non-academic domains that were slightly under the official cutoff. Just on that basis, it isn’t really the case that the gep students get preferred. In fact, if you were rejected in dsa, but your psle was way above the school cut-off, even as a gep, you can’t get in to some of the schools.


Also, by the time you finish the first half of the year in s1, there is hardly any difference btw a gep or non-gep boy. It was this and the whole dsa exercise, that we learnt the lesson that its all about merit. We decided to make him be more serious about his studies, instead of relying on the fact he had been in gep, that he could get by. This led to v good results in sec1 and2, and achieved what he didn’t in primary school. Two points - it is all about merit. And, psle isn’t THE exam. If you look at the subjects in s1 to JC and then to uni - it is a whole variety, and the journey is a long one, far far beyond psle. There are many opportunities to excel along the way and that one process (or any one process) does not define the child’s entire future.