An official reply from Ministry of Education on DSA appeals. This new policy was introduced by new Education Minister Heng Swee Keat, an old Rafflesian. A parent passed us this email which I have edited for brevity and privacy.



Dear Parent,

I refer to your email in which you requested for your daughter to be transferred to Raffles Girls’ Secondary School.

We have given careful consideration to your request and regret to inform you that your request for a transfer is unsuccessful.

We have received many similar requests for transfers from students who accepted DSA offers from other schools. The MOE policy on DSA transfers is clear. Once a student has accepted a DSA place offered to her by a school, she must remain committed to that school, in the same way that the school must honour the offers it makes to the students. Transfers are only permitted in cases where there are extenuating circumstances such that the student can no longer fulfill the commitment which forms the basis of the DSA offer.

We understand that as parents, you wish the best for your daughter. We also appreciate that you would also want your daughter to experience the Raffles education.

We wish her all the very best and have confidence that she will continue to learn and thrive in her assigned school.


Ms Lee Szer Yuen
Subject Head
Admissions
Raffles Girls’ Secondary School

MOE issues a new policy to secondary schools in October 2011 to disallow DSA appeals.


The reason is new Education Minister Heng Swee Keat wants to enforce character education across as many platforms as possible. So the moral message is that if you have nade a decision, you should stick to it. What MOE did not realise is that DSA decisions are made by parents, not their minors. Some school officials told parents that they can appeal but were over-ruled by the new Heng Swee Keat’s policy when it was suddenly released in October 2011.
As part of new PAP, the minister should give a one-year grace period ( for just one cohort ) instead of enforcing it suddenly.
Mr Heng Swee Keat , a SPF Scholar from RI, was a former senior police officer and MD of Monetary Authority of Singapore, so his style is more enforcement than consultative. He is now enforcing character education across all schools, for students only. Teachers are exempted from character development.

In this new policy, DSA students cannot apply for DSA at Secondary 2 and Secondary 4 to transfer to another school. You have to stay through all six years even if you are unhappy - so it is a dead end for some poor kids.

Anand Ravindran , a good rugby player, studied at St Andrew Secondary School ( top rugby school in Singapore ) and completed his GCE O levels at Secondary Four and was admitted to Raffles Institution via Rugby DSA ( Direct School Admission ) for JC students.


According to his schoolmates, Anand is not your regular goodie-goodie RI boy and hang out more with his former St Andrew’s school mates. He is not the academic type and is quite aggressive and " garang" in his demeanour.

In fact, Anand was with a former St Andrew Secondary School school mate Don Tan when they were attacked by the other gang after Don Tan punched one of the other gang members in the nose and caused him to bleed, based on reports by The New Paper.

A savvy friend of mine pointed out that KiasuGrandmaster XIII copied full text from another website called Edupoll ( founded 2004 ) without stating so.

Several such postings were made in July 2009 by KiasuGrandmaster XIII.

Singapore prides itself on its intellectual property protection and practices, so better to acknowledge the reference sources as we have reminded our students to do so.
For Singapore education matters, we should reference the MOE website more frequently as it is the official source.

There is a lot of ignorance in Singapore about recognised universities.

The PSC recognises all university degrees which are recognised by their local governments - and the PSC does not provide a list of ALL recognised universities overseas - as there are too many universities, considering that there are over 200 countries in the world.

Even then, getting a recognised degree does not mean that the government or the MNCs will employ you. The lowest ranking university in UK or USA is also recognised by their government as long as they are legal entities.

The right question to ask is: Will my potential university degree will held in high regard by my future employer?

For example, if 2 persons are applying for a job with the investment bank Goldman Sachs. One of them has an honours degree from University of Derby UK and another has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University USA. Who will get the job, assuming everything else is equal ? Of course, the Princeton graduate. The guy with the Derby degree does not stand a chance because his university is lowly-ranked even though it is a recognised university. University of Derby caters to the less-academically inclined students.

Even the Council for Private Education ( CPE ) in Singapore cannot tell you if a foreign degree offered by a certian private school is good. It is not their job to do that. The CPE does NOT screen foreign universities for their quality. They only screen the local private schools. They will only step in if there is a public complaint about a private school or the foreign university that they represent.

Some Singaprean parents are quite naive about this subject and their poor children suffer in the long run.

Hi All,


If you are unsure about the quality of a foreign degree from a local private school in Singapore ( Private Educational Institution ), go to this website : http://www.edupoll.org , which covers all accredited foreign universities offering programmes in Singapore.

Ideally, you should study with one of the local universities if you cannot go overseas. otherwise be very careful when enrolling at one of these private schools in Singapore- they all claim that the universities they represent are the best, when in fact they are very lowly-ranked universities in their home countries. The ang mohs in Singapore always laugh at how gullible we are when they see such advertisements in the press.

Of course, if you are not academically inclined and still want to have a university degree for status sake , then you can enrol with mass market universities like The University of Greenwich UK or CQ University Australia. Both these universities offer distance-learning programmes in Singapore.

Once again be careful, some of these private schools are owned by China businessmen and managed by Singaporeans and they cater mainly to naive China or Vitenam students with well-to-do parents.

As a millionaire owner of a local private school once said: I cater to rich China kids who cannot study. As long as they can pay, we will give them a diploma or a university degree from somewhere. They just want a legal foreign degree for social status.

Every year, our national universities like NUS and NTU will publish the bottom 10% percentile and top 10% percentile of poly GPA scores based on students admitted to the different faculties.


Depending on the annual supply of places for poly graduates, the cut-off GPA scores will be more demanding. Besides competition from other poly graduates, the bigger competition is from the pool of JC applicants.

So the strategy is to score close to a 3.9 GPA, to be sure.

There are also some useful discussions on this at: http://www.hardwarezone.com and http://www.edupoll.org.

There are some articles on this at: http://www.StraitsTimes.com, written by reporter Sandra Davies.