I remember that for biomedical olympiad, the amount of help that our school offered could be almost reduced to zero. Okay, so definitely we have to read the textbook, fair enough, and there is a list of reference texts that we have no idea where to find them. Also there are a few links to neuroscience websites. Okay now you have to read up on your own. Kthxbye. Then there's no more news until the day of the competition.
Nobody took the olympiad seriously. In fact, the entire 401 was forced to go for the olympiad. No one was motivated to study for this olympiad and the results, not surprisingly, were quite bad. Only very few of us got into the second round and maybe one or two highly motivated individuals got bronze? The school didn't announce it anyway.
In comparison, those in hci were given thick stacks of notes to refer to. Not saying that we shouldn't try to find more information on our own, but the information on the internet are so disorganized and varying in standards that some notes will definitely be helpful. And also, it's apparent that hci took this competition seriously. Therefore, I think that the students were also more motivated and thus achieved remarkable results in the end.
For SJChO it's a bit of a different story. The reason that HCI always outperform NY in SJChO is mainly due to the difference in difficulty of the school's chemistry syllabus. I still remember the first lesson of our chemistry olympiad training. We were deeply traumatized. Before the day we were still using the convention of bohr's planetary atomic model and suddenly BAM lvl 1up you need to visualise everything in 3D quantum mechanics now and we don't care if you have read the relevant chapters of your chem O textbook we are going to test you on it the first thing on the first lesson! Well the guys have no problems. At first we thought they were so into chem they actually read up and know everything by themselves. No. They actually learnt these stuff in their school syllabus, in Sec 3, before the chem O lessons started.
So we appeared very dumb there for the following chem O lessons, and for a long time felt inferior until we realise that this difference in ability is due to the syllabus.
Not sure if hc chem syllabus is a bit crazy, they actually covered way more things than that required in O level. Especially on physical chemistry. NY, in contrast, really covered only the O level things. This put us into great disadvantage, or rather, put HC into great advantage. Being properly taught and covered in school lessons is definitely better than simply skimming through everything in weekly 2 hour lessons that are not even properly delivered.
Something definitely needs to be done to NY's chem syllabus. Chem is becoming the easiest science to score among the three sciences. There are almost no challenges for chem papers, just the possibility of carelessness. Unless you have difficulty understanding the concepts, chemistry is never difficult. In comparison, NY's physics syllabus, which in my opinion is not that easy, helps to pull up the overall standard of physics students in NY, which may also explain our not so bad results for physics o.
Syllabus aside, there's another thing which I feel HC and NY are very different in, which is the passion and interest in what they are doing. From my observation, girls tend to follow rules. A lot of them don't really know what they want, so they set their grades as a measurable goal, something to spend their time working on. However, they do not feel much for the things they are putting work in. They are putting in their effort purely to be good. Be the good girls they always are.
Boys, on the contrary, can be very passionate in what they are doing. It's this great passion that motivates them and make them push themselves further and further. This is rarely observed in girls. Most girls just want to achieve their standard of "good", and that will be good enough. This may be able to explain why guys tend to outperform girls in competitions, things that require one to go for extra miles. Sure, some girls mug for competitions. But they really just mug for the sake of competition, not their own interest. In the end, they may achieve good results, but their interest may not even lie there. Of course, this theory does not fit for all guys and girls. There will be some girls who are motivated by passion and some guys motivated by result. However, because of the general trend, the school cultures of hc and ny are very different.
For example, the entry requirement for certain special programmes are much higher in NY than in HC. This does not make a lot of sense to me, because since you are only specialising in a field of interest, why must you be good at everything? However that's the case in NY. (It may be due to the belief that most girls when they mug, they mug for everything instead of just one. So only the overall result reflect true ability of the student.) It seems that in NY, you must be first good at something before you can develop your passion for it. I'm not sure what the culture of HC is like, but I know that the requirement is definitely lower, there are more people in the program and many of them who are extremely passionate individuals get to participate in various related activities.
Comparing our high school lives, I feel that mine is a bit wasted. What did I spend my time on? Well I admit in Sec 1 I was totally goofing around. In sec 2 my passion started to develop for the sciences partly because I was good at them and partly because I found the other lessons (especially humanities) unbearable. In sec 3 and 4 was when I started to get really interested in the subject through exposure to higher order stuff.
The exposure that the school gave was definitely not enough. I tried to borrow relevant books and read them. However, reading these books was at the bottom of my to do list. With so much workload and other mugging to do, I have to eventually return them without absorbing much of the content. (just like now I have a university physics textbook right beside me and I'm still blogging this sigh I should read it thoroughly someday). You see, that "someday" is always the excuse for not reading these stuff. I admit I'm a bit of a procrastinator, but I also wished that back then I'm not so caught up in school work, especially in projects and assignments that I know won't assist me much in my learning.
Maybe it's really that my passion is not strong enough. Maybe if it's a hc guy he will prioritize those readings over the mundane school work. I don't know. It could be my own problem, but I was trying. The mindset of many ny girls is to get decent grades for exams, and I was probably one of them. But I'm already in that group that starts late. Some of the hardcore muggers start preparation one months before block tests and two months before end of year. In the end? Good results still not guaranteed (one hard paper that relies heavily on thinking rather than memorisation kills all). I really don't see the point in setting the examination as your only goal since the examination system is very flawed. Marks don't reflect competence. Some of my PRC friends still get many marks deducted because they didn't write precisely enough. Even for physics you have to remember certain model answers to get the full mark. There's just no point.
Sorry if my post sounds incoherent. It's meant to be a rant post so yeah...but the issues discussed are real and significant. I'm now very happy with all the subjects being the ones I like. I really hope my passion can be strong enough to motivate me to achieve greater heights. Also, practice, although not very interesting, is important to achieve competence. I'm not striving for proficiency but a clear understanding must be reached and I must be able to apply the concepts well. I shall keep that in mind.
P.s. not sure if you can see but I'm trying to improve my english. My english in this post is really bad with repeated vocab and sentence structures...sigh. Also it's a bit sad thinking that probably no one will read this post in the first place.
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