When everyone is reading their textbooks and preparing for exams, it would seem somewhat unwise to be reading some other popular Economics books or even the Bible. Yet as a student captured in this whole paper chase, one needs also to realise that there is little value in re-reading what one has been reading for practically the whole year. Combining the content learnt with newer, obliquely relevant knowledge improves your associative memory and can remarkable enhance the ability of questions to trigger knowledge you've already acquired previously over the term.

Drilling yourself can create an 'instinctive' reaction but damage proper association in our memory. Your understanding of things becomes locked in a fixed sequence, a sort of linear series that does little justice to the true underlying logic of the subject matter. Knowledge and the actual connections within information is often networked, in the style of a web; much like a wikipedia entry with lots of linked stuff here and there. You cannot study things in a set sequence unless the specific topic involves simply a sequence of logical steps that is almost necessarily unidirectional. Even when there're steps in sequence, as long as you can move in different directions and jump between steps, a web-like structure of studying would better aid learning.

Crap helps sometimes

Mindmaps and tables are incredibly useful methods of organizing web-structured information. Of course, when I suggest tables, I was actually thinking of multi-dimensional ones broken up into sets of 2-dimensional tables. It is the same as the sort of summary you find in the resource section of our site. And the unique feature of web-structured information is that having more information and holding more knowledge actually helps you to retain new things/ideas even better.

Anyone who had the chance to read Joshua Foer's 'Moonwalking with Einstein' would realise that their traditional notions about mental capacities are completely mistaken. Your mind is not a closet that runs out of space after storing too much stuff; rather your mind doesn't lose the ability to store stuff - it simply loses the ability to retrieve things when you fail to catalogue it properly when trying to memorise it. You don't have to try and master the techniques he mentioned and be a memory champion in order to ace your exams but it does help to pick up a tip or two about the implications of these memory techniques that the mental athletes use.

Storage & Cataloguing
I'm using rather machine-like terms but the mind is something wonderfully organic and obviously defies machine logic. It appears to act like a machine while being way more flexible and powerful without requiring too much resources (ie. efficient). When studying, nothing is more important than focus and concentration. There's some things that can be picked up quickly within a short span of time, then try to spend short, focused units of time on them and then take breaks. Others requires long amounts of less intense concentration but lots of practice - and you should know what to do by now. Still, take breaks.

Pin-point Focus

During these breaks, read a book, look at things around you and relate the things you learn to your life. Pay your bills and think about your finances; go online to shop for stuff and think about the signals behind those prices; hunt for bargains near your home and consider the consumer surplus vendors are trying to extract from you when using two-part pricing. Don't compartmentalize what you learn from your life. It's kind of nerdy/geeky but whatever, human progress by putting knowledge into application and not knowing things, storing them into paper manuscripts and placing them in a library. Economic progress at the cutting edge are made in industries, businesses and market exchanges, not research laboratories, academics offices or think-tanks.

Those thoughts and stuff you learn from the books you read helps to anchor the ideas you've acquired; they do not distract you from the main point unless you wander too far yourself. More importantly, they are more useful anchors than the pointless information that Joshua Foer has to remember in order to have a set index of the cards. These additional information you acquire forms a natural index for you to organize the information in your mind.

When your eyes are tired, try listening audio versions of the things you're trying to learn; when your ears are tired, try writing notes from the textbooks or organize the information in a different way (when you do that, you're interpreting them in your own terms). At the same time, you're engaging more sense to help you remember the information. Your mind not only remembers the abstract ideas but associates the muscle fatigue, the movements of your eyeballs across the pages, or the sounds you hear, whether it's the voice of the lecturers, the tones and pitches, the emphasis and such. All these meta-information helps to enhance the anchors in learning and provides a denser web for more ideas to cling on to.

Recall & Retrieval

Now during the exam, you realise that when the question comes, it triggers you to recall the information that has been acquired, sometimes with a little adjustment, that your mind makes quite smoothly. Other times, you need to locate what it is that you need to retrieve before acting on it. The actual pathway of recall is usually more bizarre than we'd like to imagine it is. The thought process could go like:

What is this (concept)? I remember I read it (somewhere in this textbook). I remember I was in my room when reading it. Ah yes, I was sitting on my bed then, and after that particular reading I went to get tea for myself. Oh yea, and I was thinking about how the distribution of the quality of the tea would come from the 'ensemble distribution' when they are sampled somewhat randomly even though the quality of the tea might be simply directly correlated with the packet that comes before it. Ah, so the ensemble distribution is the potential limiting distribution for the variable following the random walk process at any time 't'.

Obviously 'tea' and time 't' does have some sort of audial association but I shall not go into that. Even if you don't know what the concept mentioned above is about; you get my drift about how seemingly unrelated stuff can help you in the process of your knowledge retrieval. They need not be directly related but they help when at the point of studying, you constantly make mental associations between the things you learn and the things you're doing, or engaged in. Explaining to friends about the ideas and challenging each other's understanding of the concepts helps immensely.

When it comes to learning, it pays to understand the organ we're using to learn so that we can trick it into doing what we need it to.

Setting it up properly

Spending more than one and a half decade in a competitive education system like that of Singapore is pretty much enough to give me a good sense of what is wrong with it. It's a really good demonstration of how competition have been exploited way too far to attain an arbitrarily defined sort of excellence that has caused us to lose sight of the original intent of the competition itself. And perhaps this article discussing the state of NUS Lectures provides us with good insights on the effects of the 'Singapore Student Mentality'.

In a competitive set up of our education system, we want students to develop good character, work ethics, working knowledge of their field and an ability to motivate themselves to work hard. The design of our assessment and curriculum will have to match that in order to achieve the objectives of this competitive set up. Lectures and typical lessons should preferably not become 'exam-preps' as they probably are now. And while student feedback on course content and teaching style is good, it should be ignored when trying to drive lessons towards the direction of mind-numbing exam-preparation. At the end of the day, we want students who could go out there in life and perform.

A friend recently commented that bright Singaporean students sometimes face problems with getting in US schools because the top schools there are really not interested in an alumni who simply gets a good job, works hard and be recognized by his boss. These universities are interested in producing students who would be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg (sorry I'm only thinking about more tech related companies for now). They are not interested in people who can top their cohort with their GPAs, they want people who top their cohort with ideas that the markets applaud, visions that talents would follow and products consumers demand, or influence the economic policies. This makes them bolder when it comes to admitting students who may not have the scores but the great stories about their exploits on trips to exotic places, initiation of eccentric projects, failed entrepreneurship attempts.

If our economy is to transit to greater heights, and human capital is the most important thing to a tiny economy like Singapore then modifying education, and not migration policy is going to be priority.

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.

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.

The LSE Course. Indeed.

I'm not paid for this advertisement but in any case, as I'm closing to the end of the first half of my LSE100 course here in the London School of Economics & Political Science, I thought it'll be nice to talk about it and tell the world that there's such a course at university and the importance of the objectives driving the development of this course.

My life in London has been extremely busy, particularly this term, spanning 11 weeks (the last of which comes next week). This explains the severe lack of contribution to this website. But fret not, ERPZ will stay online not indefinitely but I'll try to maintain it as far as I can afford it. The plans for expansion of ERPZ have been stowed away for now given how busy the authors are. New materials are welcomed so any readers who are interested may fill up the contact form to get in touch with us.

LSE100 is sort of like the General Paper we have at A Levels but it goes to explore specific issues at much greater depth but then try to link this up between disciplines. What GP can at most accomplish is to synthesize topics and try to help us understand issues from a more general perspective. LSE100 tries to help you understand issues and topics from a variety of perspective, exploring the methodologies of research used in different discipline, their impact on the conducting research and how they view the world, as well as compare the 'academic' nuances that pervade each discipline.

I believe the methods which LSE100 uses to engage students will prove to be popular means of teaching and course design in the future. Framing modules into questions serves to exploit the intellectual curiosity of the student audience and though at the end of each module you realised you don't actually manage to answer the questions posed, you do discover the various thinking that academics go through in trying to work on these problems. At the same time, the special lectures that introduces students to various skills are particularly important as well, not only because they are intellectually stimulating but that they are useful beyond the course itself, in fact, useful beyond the university education and future work life.

At JC, I find that I am always able to reduce the course content into rather simple theories or opinions that will score well in exams. Often, I raise the complexity of arguments a little in a bid to impress, as you may have already realised from some of my writings. Yet I can assure you that at university, the sort of thinking required is going to be at an absolutely higher level. The essay I've to submit next week for this course totally got me wadding through serious complexity that was simply irreconcilable and at the end of the day I'm even thinking to myself, 'is this question of any relevance to anyone at all?' The answer turned out to be yes, and it is relevant but in such subtle ways that most ordinary academics would fail to realize until confronted with it.

And so for students who have done exceptionally well at the recent A Levels and have the chance to consider studying overseas as well as those who already know they will be spending their undergraduate years at the London School of Economics and Political Science, this might be an aspect of LSE life you might want to look forward to or think about before you actually come over. Please feel free to get in touch with me (once again, through the contact form) to learn more about studying and being a Singaporean here at the LSE!

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!

About the Cash...

Just went a friend at the LSE studying Law was talking about how the returns on a study of Law is not exactly worth it, The Economist describes how American Law School graduates are finding themselves jobless and under-compensated (compared to what they had expected). But should these students have studied Law because of the prospects of making big bucks?

At times you might find yourself drowning in reality, with people aggressively pursuing high-paying jobs, thinking fast-paced, intense life suits them. People are hungry for success but this success should be something you measure yourself with and not what others measure you with. Staying focused on one's goals are important and it becomes more and more of a challenge as you grow up and become faced with ever increasing alternatives in the world.

In school one usually follows the 'standard goal' of trying to do well and get good results and as you go higher in your education you realise that the co-curricular activities are important as well and then there's the community service; and then there's networking with peers, professionals, even politicians, potential employers, potential superiors and finally, when you're out in the world: trying to do the things you want to do (or you think you want to do). The point is that there are dozens of people out there who are trying to convince you that their idea of success matches yours and you should basically adopt their definition and go along what they defined to be great. You're very much on your own and through your life, you need to sharpen your ability to decide things independently and then bear the consequences of your decisions yourself. In other words, you need to grow up, in the truest sense of the word.

Education and social interactions have great powers in terms of encouraging conformity and you need to always blend-in while retaining yourself. I recently attended a talk and the speaker was quoting an assessment of kids' divergent thinking and 98% of the kids aged 3-5 are classified divergent thinkers but when they get to elementary school, and the assessment was done on the same kids, the figure dropped to 50%. By the time they're in high school, it's 32% and finally, a separate assessment of adults classified only 2% of them as divergent thinkers. Conformity is powerful and illusionarily (if there's such a word) comfortable.

The truths are, you don't have to be rich to be happy; the truth is success is a journey, it's about the trip you make and not the destination of it; the point is the action you took and not so much the outcome of it. The action is what tells people about you; the outcome serves only to tell half the story. So before you follow the flow, think where you wanna go.

Make them interesting!

I've been giving tips for Project Work and I thought that since it's close to the time when Promos are about over and OP for PW is going to come, it'll be good to draw attention of readers to my page on Project Work, especially Oral Presentation. Here's the part I've written about it:

The Oral Presentation is probably the most frustrating part of the entire PW, forcing the less eloquent students to present and grading them both as a group and individual at the same time means that groups with weaker students would have suffer more. It would therefore pay to work doubly hard.

You can go through the net to find tips on doing presentations; they would invariably involve watching your tone, gestures, maintaining eye contact with audience. Yet you can't master all these without practising; so I would recommend that after the team has decided what to present and allocated the parts to the members, practise often in front of the mirror and try to memorise your script by repeating it over and over again.

Team dynamics is judged during the presentation so no matter how busy you are (shouldn't be since by then the exams would be over already), the team should meet up to rehearse together. Going through the presentation in its entirety would help you track your time spent, familiarize with what you have to say at different slides and also to get team mates to watch each other and point out any awkwardness in gestures or pronunciations.

I recommend rehearsing the entire thing at least 10 times before the actual presentation; each rehearsal should involve the entire team. The maximum rehearsals in a day should be about 4; leaving time in-between the evaluate your own performance and work in improvements. Try to do a video recording of your entire presentation and then watch it together as a team; more often than not, you are the one who can correct yourself best. And since you can't see yourself on the spot doing the presentation, a video recording would help greatly.

To make the presentation interesting, you could either use video clips, animations, or do a skit. Most students opt for the skit because of the lack of other resources. When dealing with skits, ensure the script is well crafted and of relevance to what you're doing in the project.

I cannot stop emphasizing that practice is really the key to doing well and there's no point practicing over and over without improvements so find a way to evaluate yourself in every practice and then make use of that feedback. It can be from the mirror, your video recording, your voice recording (to check for pronunciation, tones, speed of speaking) or your friends and family. Just make sure you practice for the purpose of improving and not just to pretend you've done your part. Make every single practice your best effort.

Make sure it's long term...

I'm finally in London and fulfilling my dream of studying in London School of Economics. I'm hoping to share this little insight about learning from my department's Undergraduate Tutor. She mentioned that the only true learning is by our long term memory and when you're older, with thousand things to remember (such as how much laundry is accumulating, when to get the groceries, what to cook for dinner and plenty of meeting with different friends), your short term memory would have much less space for learning and that's why you may need more time picking up new things.

The advantage is that whatever you pick up will stay with you for a long time to come. On the other hand, the youngsters typical learn things fast since they've got good short term memory (having more space since there's not much matters about life to remember and also less old information) but then they run the risk of quickly forgetting once they no longer practice. It takes a long time to transfer things over from the short term to the long term memory.

So the key to true learning is really to practice, practice, practice and recall stuff now and then.

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...