Advice on EoM Selection
By Kevin
You should realise by now that EoM requires that you pick something scholarly to evaluate. Many students seem to be under the impression that news reports are authoritative sources for scholarly research but the fact is they're only useful for establishing public sentiments, or facts but not so much when it comes to trying to qualify opinions. Say for example, the Straits Times article titled "Malaysia's Worsening Brain Drain" (see link) written by the Senior Regional Correspondent, Leslie Lopez, appears on first instance to be useful for looking into the 'social conflicts' in Malaysia. Nevertheless, a JC PW supervisor would advise you against it.
As a matter of fact, PW is a preparation for the kind of research work you've to practice for many fields in the social sciences or business after JC. The newspapers are a good starting point to identify ideas or other materials that are related to your subject of inquiry but not the end in itself. In other words, although Lesile Lopez is a senior regional correspondent of ST, his job is not really to study the relationship of the different races of Malaysians. It would be good that you can find out more about this brain drain that he mentions, check if any research is done in this area, or any statistics is gathered and use them as your EoM material. Those are scholarly stuff, done by people who are indeed studying that area or one aspect of the area you're looking into.
In the EoM, you're supposed to first establish the reliability of the material, then explain its relevance by citing its value to your project. For the topic of conflict, the material you've selected may be helping you to understand the 'causes' of the conflict or its 'effects'. And ultimately, its value should ideally be reflected in the use of its information in your Written Report. You can do this to the news article as well but its contribution to your WR would be quite minimal.
Taking Examinations
By Kevin
Best advice ever
It's slightly more than 12 hours to the first examination I'll be taking in university, at the London School of Economics. I am probably not excited enough about it given that I'm still typing away on my computer and fiddling with my website when I really should be studying. Fact that all student should recognize at this point of time is that you should get rest and be mentally prepared for the papers rather than try to cram more stuff into your mind. It is a time when you start considering the difficulty of the challenge that you are taking on and preparing yourself mentally for it so that you have the capacity to handle it and to accept it when there are areas you simply cannot conquer at the moment. Expectations management is as important as forgetting your expectations altogether and focusing on the moment.
Besides being constantly reminded of the dangers of not panicking during examinations, we are informed that we must expect examinations to be difficult - and that the teaching staff of LSE are proud to say that. I pointed out in my personal blog that LSE includes the following statement in their document on examination procedures:
Please note that examinations are intentionally difficult, and feel more so under the pressure of timed conditions. The cachet of LSE degrees, in the eyes of other universities and employers, is at least in part based on the School’s rigorous academic standards. You should not therefore be surprised when your examinations feel more difficult than the previous years’ papers from which you have been revising. Examinations may contain questions that surprise you and that are unlike past examination questions. This is intentional: the examiners want to test that you have understood the material well enough to cope with new types of problems. Though challenging and difficult, the examination will also be fair. – Examination Procedures for Candidates 2011
Yet, I'm sure every year, the examinations still 'surprise' students in their creativity in terms of design and questioning methods. This is because, for a typical student with experience over the past 15 years or so of examinations have always walked into examination halls having done piles of past year questions. These are often an accurate reflection of the questions that will be coming out in the examination. The scope for creativity in question-setting haven't actually been exploited in those cases. At LSE, we are constantly informed that this will not be the case and we should really all be mentally prepared for that. This is a good thing because it reflects challenges we face in the world. Problems are not exactly problems when you already solved it before and know exactly how to approach it. My Mum says issues always crop up when she is the one using the computer. Fact is, I do often encounter those 'issues' but they are not exactly 'issues' to me - I navigate through them like the waking up ritual (rubbing eyes, folding duvet, checking time, heading to the toilet). A decent university knows that they should not be testing you with how to run through routines (that might even already be second nature to the brilliant students).
And it is these surprises in examinations that can make us proud of ourselves when we manage to overcome them, and when we manage to achieve some decent results out of it. At this point of time just before the paper, for those who feels they are still inadequately prepared: accept that no one is ever perfectly prepared for examinations. Instead, focus on making yourself ready by familiarising yourself with the examination procedures, the things you've to do for the paper and getting enough rest. As our undergraduate tutor advised in her email addressing the undergraduates of the department:
I do urge you, no matter how ill-prepared you might feel - to get really and truly enough sleep, not to try to cram, and to have a rehearsed routine for avoiding panic if you find an exam harder than you have ever faced so far in your life [...]
You actually need more sleep if you have not studied steadily because you will need to be in good control. There is almost nothing you can cram that will compensate for not having good reaction time and that ability not to loose your perspective.
I do find this to be brilliant advice and I'd urge anyone reading this to do the same in the time towards the examination. And life, more often than not, moves on during the moments when you stay calm. Time freezes when you panic. So if there's anything in the paper you realise you don't know, keep calm and carry on.
Mode of Doing
By Kevin
Take Action!
After spending 15 years in education, I spent a brief two and a half year or so working (2 years in the military and then 6 months in the private sector). I returned to education after that; almost completing my first year of education since the hiatus. So I guess I know a thing or two about studying, or at least learning. Of course, everyone have different styles of learning but from my experience with people around me (who have mostly done remarkably well in the education system back in Singapore), studying/revising for school work almost definitely involves some form of active 'doing' rather than passive stuff (like plain reading).
The trick to absorbing new materials and learning in general is to involve as many senses as possible. This is a concept I explored a while back in 'Remembering Stuff'. It is then, more sensible to draw mindmaps while reading, to do underlining, annotations, taking notes while going through materials. When I go through my Economics notes, I often have to try deriving the equations myself because if I don't walk myself through the equations using my own interpretation of the logic of the theory, I will never be able to internalize the materials. This true for all the hard sciences (granted, economics is not exactly a hard science but when it comes down to the equations and formulas, we can reasonably assume it takes on that slice of nature of hard sciences).
But what about social sciences and humanities? It helps to draw mindmaps, basically to make connections between things that are studied. And the best part about mind maps is that it allows you to make many different complex connections. Although at the end of the day you might not actually find the stuff you drew particularly useful, the mindmap is really more of a tool to pin down your thinking of the connections than a visual representation of the actual concepts (especially true when you're doing revision) so it's fine. Getting in the mode of 'doing' activates your kinesthetic self and enlist the help of your muscles to 'remember' stuff for you. It's not that the muscle cells helps you to remember stuff but that the motor neurons help to provide another channel by which the new material enters your brains.
All that busyness also keeps you engaged and focused, especially if you're like me, dozing off easily as I stare at my materials. So for those who are studying out there, preparing for examinations, plainly trying to be consistent, don't waste your time staring blankly at your notes. Take some action and learn something.
PW Season II
By Kevin
Any Resolution?
I noticed some reader searching 'Conflict' on ERPZ already! It's the Task 2 of the PW question this year and seeing my entry on 'Risk', you naturally think I've prepared something for conflict as well. Well, perhaps. I'm laying down the guidelines for 'Conflict' in this entry.
As usually, the two PW question themes for each year are quite closely related and I remember when I was working on mine - the project we've chosen is so versatile it actually fits both of the themes and we had to decide which one it matches more nicely. That sometimes have to do with reading the requirements of the question carefully. In this case, 'Risk' requires you to provide a guideline for risk-taking while 'Conflict' requires a guideline for resolution.
I personally find this more tricky than 'Risk' because conflicts may sometimes be resolved not because of any external force or a specific path that any party takes. It can be resolved by the changing nature of the conflict, the balance of power of the two parties in the conflict. In my studies of the Cold War, that's exactly how it worked out. There was a gradual but steady shift in the dynamics of the conflict as it progressed. The periods of Détente may not have done as much to end the Cold war as the exhaustion of Soviet Union's ability to sustain growth.
Aim
This project asks you to show how an understanding of conflicts may be of help in resolving conflicts in the future.Task Requirements
Identify one conflict (in politics, education, human interaction, etc.).
Explain its main causes and analyse the positive and negative effects which resulted.Suggest how lessons learned might help resolve fututre conflicts.
Once again, there is a whole load of cases and examples out there for conflicts and their resolution (and also conflicts that dragged for ages and fail to be resolved; eg. Arab-Israeli) so just take your pick and then try and analyse them carefully. Think about some of these points:
- Analyse the conflict by classifying the factors contributing it (you can follow the political scientists method of arranging them into 'agency', 'structure' or 'idea' factors).
- Examine the agenda and intentions of each sides of the conflict. Question their interest in the continuation of the conflict.
- Investigate the trend in the unfolding of the conflict; did it escalate at any point; is there a climax; at each stage, what might be the key to the turn of events (use counterfactual reasoning).
- What are the effects of the conflict on other parties/stakeholders? Did it help push them to take action to resolve or fuel the conflict?
- What are the aspects of the conflict that each side controlled and how did this impact on the eventual resolution?
- Once again, combine these parts to obtain a mindmap linking all these ideas and then identify the key characteristics of the conflict, then carefully select the actions that might have led to resolution. It might be important to identify the sort of conflict that your guidelines can resolve because I believe that it cannot be generalised to all conflicts. If you want to come up with a truly general guideline, it'd be so abstract that people have no idea how to execute it; it's going to be just 'common sense' that add nothing to our knowledge.
Like the previous PW guidance, comments are welcomed though students should not expect me to be guiding them on their specific projects.
PW Season
By Kevin
Take the right risks...
I guess it's the Project Work season again and it'll be worth your while to check out our PW page for some generic advice. This year, I'm glad to be able to offer some of my personal take on the question and the potential ideas and approaches. This could possibly the most useful piece on PW that ERPZ can offer for this year.
I shall first tackle Task 1, 'Risk'; it is not too tough and usually, PW questions are given so that you have a lot of room to explore different things. Which is wonderful.
Aim
This project task encourages you to took at the idea of risk and then show how risk-taking might affect people.Task Requirements
Choose one example of risk-taking (in history, business, environmental studies, science, etc.), show how the need to take specific risks arose and analyse the positive and negative effects which resulted from the actions taken.Suggest how lessons learned might be used to guide similar risk-taking in the future by individuals and/or groups.
There is a whole load of cases and examples out there for risk-taking and risky behaviours so just take your pick and then try and analyse each of the cases carefully. Ask yourself some of these questions:
- What are the impacts of the action taken?
- What is the agenda of the risk-takers?
- Think abt how the risk-taking has been coordinated.
- What're the aspects within their control and how did they manage these aspects?
- What are the aspects they couldnt control and how they take actions to cover up down-side risks or prevent undesirable outcomes?
- Use all these different parts to piece together the lessons and come up with a sort of 'guideline' or training programme
Comments are welcomed though students should not expect me to be guiding them on their specific projects.
Economics Essay Guide
By Kevin
More Help...
I was working on my articles when I discovered, amongst my documents, a half-completed Economics Essay guide I was preparing for my tuition students. Apparently I didn't finish it though parts of it consists of what I've already taught to those students. I took some time to finish it up, recalling the content I had intention to include when the idea for such a guide hatched a couple of months back while I was still in Singapore. Obviously, having already been through the A Levels, my students won't be too interested and so to make this work useful at all, I'm publishing it completely free on ERPZ!
You can find it in the Economics Section of Resources; and here's a direct link to it.
I briefly thought of including a list of essay command words but this list seemed good enough and I think students can find such information online pretty easily. My focus is more on presenting ideas about essay writing that is normally not covered in school or quickly glossed over despite their importance.
Hope the students of Economics for the A Levels next year and the upcoming years would find it useful. Meanwhile, here's a Happy New Year to all readers in advance!
GP Arguments: Change
By Kevin
Get Thinking, then Write!
This is one new feature I'm trying to introduce into the blog; which I reckon would intrude into the territory of the GP blogs but I find that these are rather rare materials online so I'm setting out to share them. I'll give essay outlines but basically just some ideas for arguments enough to seed an essay. My outlines do not form even a skeleton for the essay, think of it as an embryo with lots of potential for development. And the development part would be the readers' job.
Today our question is
"Change is the only constant in life." Is change necessarily good? Discuss.
This is a really vague question; more like a SAT writing section essay than a GP essay but the A Levels do plant such questions in their papers. It's just that you've 12 to choose from so you probably missed out this sort. Typically, weak students want to choose questions that are narrower and strong students should try their hands on broader topics that they are confident of managing and have a decent scope to work on. This question is one of those broad ones where you'll have to define the scope for yourself.
Pre-Writing Questions
Before you start writing, ask yourself a few questions. These are key questions that can be adapted to any essay questions you get:
1) What is your benchmark for good?
2) What are the various types of 'change' you're going to talk about?
3) How many points on each 'side' are you going to present?
4) How are you going to break out of the question?
The benchmarks can be based on certain values you adopt; it could have something to do with morality, or utilitarianism. So you can consider it good if it provides the largest benefits to the largest group of people. The 'changes' you want to talk about can be economic growth or development/decline; or it can be about changes one undergoes as one grow.
Breaking out of the question is an important part of GP essay that all students needs to appreciate. At the end of the essay the marker wants to see how you can make your essay relevant to the world at large or whether you are able to take on a perspective that is bigger than the question itself and identify the significant portion that needs to be considered. Here's a sample of the points I might use for the essay:
Central Argument: Change offers an opportunity/hope; status quo always provides room for improvements and without change, there can't be improvements.
"Change is Good"
1) Without change, the lives of the poor would forever stay so, with no hope or chances to move up the social ladder or improve their situation.
2) Changes makes actions and choices meaningful; without changes, life is predictable and routine.
3) Even when changes are unpleasant or bad, they train us to take on challenges and grow to be stronger. Growth is essentially change and vice versa.
"Change is Not Good"
1) Change destroys the important cultures or traditions that we value so much. Improvements may sometimes be at the expense of traditions.
2) Change introduces the strange and unfamiliar and throws us into a state of loss.
3) Changes means that all must keep up in order to stay relevant and there are people who would be left behind by changes.
Concluding Point: Change is an inevitable feature of life so it is irrelevant to consider a world without change. Whether change is necessarily good depends on our reaction to it and more often than not, we are armed to embrace changes and make good of it.
Notice how the concluding point zooms out of the entire frame that focused only whether change is good? It demonstrates the fluidity of ideas and that your writing must actively engage in the concepts you're dealing with rather than just merely stating points.
That's all for this question. I'll try to repeat this for other GP questions out there...
Essay Writing
By Kevin
Get Cracking!
ERPZ comes up with advice about writing now and then; earlier I looked into my writing styles following advice from The Economist. Kwang Guan did a piece on adjectives, and for advice on writing Personal Statement, it's also helpful to look out for stuff applicable for normal writing as well.
For my friends who're going back to university and trying to write good, generic essays, here's some key points about essay writing that's really important. Hopefully, it'll be useful especially to the boys who are entering university only after two years of National Service and feeling dumber.
1) Cut down on needless adjectives
2) Vary sentence lengths
3) Focus on the topic at hand, don't allow yourself to stray
Yup, writing is that simple.
Learning By Examples
By Kevin
Matching Context
Materials on ERPZ are often more focused on delivery of concepts; in particular, our current set of notes in the Economics Section deals largely with the theories and concepts covered in the syllabus and not so much on how to tackle your exams. Essays requires additional skills typically not covered in your lecture notes or textbooks. You could learn them from model essays but it would be better if you build up a style for yourself.
I'll be writing quite a few entries on essay-writing for Economics, which can also be applied to other social sciences at A Levels. I'll start off with an emphasis on examples. The school usually only teach you how to do half of your essay - the conceptual part. And if you don't explain and illustrate (diagrams for) your concepts particularly well, then you can't even get a pass. The other part of your essay has to do with application, which really means explaining in context and giving examples tailored to the context.
When dealing with a question that asks about market structures in Singapore; perhaps one requiring you to cite an example of a oligopoly. You could talk about the hypermarkets or supermarkets but you have to define them carefully and describe the correct players:
Examples of Players
Hypermarts (Giant, Fairprice Extra, Carrefour)
Supermarkets (Cold Storage, Fairprice, Sheng Siong)Why Oligopoly?
Hypermarts and Supermarts compete on prices and promotions, enjoy large economies of scale from marketing (bulk purchase, advertising, transport) and are usually anchor tenants at various shopping malls. Their mutual interdependence is reflected in attempts to market their house brands during recessions and also trying to differentiate by positioning themselves slightly different. Cold Storage goes for the 'sophisticated but affordable' image while Fairprice going for the 'simple and affordable' image; of course, Sheng Siong targets majority of the households looking for cheap deals.
Within the Singapore market, there are also other shops dealing in the same sort of 'industry' as the hypermarkets and supermarkets so one needs to be careful when discussing them. It is important that you look into the scale of the market you're hoping to discuss about. If you're thinking about just a large neighbourhood or area; then players may actually be engaged in monopolistic competition rather than oligopoly.
Examples of Players
ECONS Mini-market & Neighbourhood Provision ShopsWhy Monopolistic Competition?
Compete based on niche markets, providing specialized services (eg. Home delivery by provision shops) and benefit from relatively inelastic demand for necessities.
Do not confuse the different market structure; be clear about the scale of the market you're discussing and think about the players. For localized competition, the players could be specific outlets or stores; but then for a grander scale market, the players would be the group (like with chain-stores and lots of outlets). The explanation on why each of these examples would fit into your concept or theoretical framework is extremely important. Saying stuff like 'most markets in Singapore are Oligopoly, for example the Telecommunications industry' will not be a clear demonstration of your depth of thought. To give your essay more rigour you have to describe the competitive behaviours of the firms in the industry and give examples of actual marketing campaigns or events.
Search and Research
By Kevin
Looking Up the Web
It has been a long time since I wrote something about handling school work and such. I've been working on a couple of articles for some external parties and doing quite a lot of research and writing. The experience can be frustrating and tiring as I plow through loads of data, informative material and readings and then get lost in bits of thoughts here and there, never settling down to write. Such is research, you ask a few simple questions that you expect could be answered with a sentence or two but end up having loads of related answers and information that leads you to the fact that answers you're looking for is way more complex. Then you realise you have got to put together evidence for each of your claims and explanations. People were asking me how I manage all that stuff, I told them that you've got to work out a plan somehow.
So in this article, I'd be discussing my method of planning writing and research. It's by no means a definitive answer to managing your research or school projects but it might be an option you'd like to choose. I'm writing very generally about the kind of information research that leads to writing a paper/article; the sort that doesn't require you to don on a lab coat and hold up test-tubes.
Ultimate Tool
I recommend that before you start using Google, lay out some fundamental questions your paper/article would answer or specific information it will provide. It can be as general as an overview to a topic, or as specific as the number of petrol kiosk in a particular town. After listing them out, mark out the more specific questions and then hunt for the data first. These are usually the data sets you are going to use to introduce a particular claim or to support your theories. If there's no such data available then you can find other proxy indicators or try and switch the type of evidence. It is important that you start off checking for the availability of the data you need or whatever you're going to write would be groundless anyways.
After gathering the data you need, hunt for general articles on the topic that you are working on. These are the articles that refer to other more specific sources for information, or sites like Answers.com and Wikipedia. They serve as a directory for the topic and also to alert you or anything about the issue/topic that you might have overlooked. Often, these can also be blog entries that link up articles of related topic, much like the ones on ERPZ. When you're clear you have a general idea of the topic and know briefly the issues involved, start planning your writing, listing the arguments, the progression of arguments and the sequence you present information to make your case. Often, some information you will need to provide are things you are not necessarily aware of, perhaps the revenue of a particular firm, the market share in an industry, or the response of a CEO to a recent affair. These are the stuff you didn't initially set out to include but subsequently find rather significant.
Armed with the plan, start searching specifically for the information you need and formulate/sharpen your arguments according to these information. Unknowingly, you have actually slashed down the amount of content that you've read. By using general articles as signposts for your planning, you have drawn up the parameters of your research, something difficult when you've not read up anything or done any research. This explains the preliminary research into key and essential data you need as well as the general articles to get you started. The rest of your writing would build around these anchors that you've found in the beginning.
Then, follow through your plan as you write. This works for any volume of research, those that takes days to weeks and possibly months. For the ones where data sets have to be built from scratch either through ripping apart official statistics or carrying out your own surveys, the process would be placed between preliminary research and the ultimate planning. So happy searching and re-searching!