This was how several Redditors responded to the question: “We’ve all heard many great things about NUS, the top university in the whole of Asia. But I feel that not enough has been said about the “darker” side of NUS. What are some negative things you’ve heard about or experienced with the students, lecturers, culture, quality of education and degrees?”
halfbakery: “I liked NUS, but I think one of the problems (at least for my department) was that they pulled up rankings by importing professors with really great research backgrounds. Unfortunately, these people generally also couldn’t teach…they were simply not interested in helping us learn. This was already honours year, and the best profs really pushed our critical thinking abilities by conducting lots of class discussion, got us seeing the common threads between the readings they assigned etc. The bad ones just dumped a stack of readings on us and went through them in a very superficial way the next lesson. Basically, teaching was peripheral to their research.”
samleecx: “I’m from NUS and trust me that it’s an absolute shit show. I’m still gonna try to be objective tho. Actually to be fair there isn’t much too different any corporate business. Things are left shitty until some big-shot comes around and then they tidy up the front end and put up a good show. It just seems really shitty if you think about it as an educational institution.
NUS has a culture that heavily sides with staff more than their students. Students get the worst treatment in priorities. This might seem kinda minor but as a student that is lucky enough to be able to drive to school, you’ll see that staff parking lots are stupidly convenient while students have to climb carparks from the foot of the mountain to the top (don’t forget that NUS is built on a ridge).
Lecturers are terrible. They don’t give a rats ass about your education and most of them don’t even know what they are teaching. It’s evident through the lecture notes that they put in minimal effort, sometimes just posting excerpts of the text books in a randomized order in each slides. It’s kind of like they have the mentality “the information you need is on that slide, figure it out its not my problem I’m doing my job”. The infrastructure in the labs are very outdated. My lab uses CRT monitors and runs windows 2000. Got a thumbdrive? Sorry, can’t be used. Please purchase a diskette or CD to copy your shitty images.
Common areas for studying SMELLS like shit , internal bus drivers are rude,rough and don’t care if their driving causes the passengers to fall and the faculty constantly sends malicious content through the school’s email network. I could go on and on.
But on the flip side, sometimes girls dress up to go to school, which is nice.”