Adopting A New Admissions Process

So the biggest challenge was we could do one of two things. One is we would carry on to the system that we were so used to, by academic grades. And we thought that for a new university to get the best would be a bit difficult because everybody is going to head towards NUS and head towards NTU. 

The alternative was to try to formulate a different kind of admission policy. So we thought that because the government's mandate was that we were supposed to turn out graduates for the future, for the new millennium actually, and the IAAP the International Academic Advisory Panel, that was responsible for actually recommending to the government, in 1997, that there should be a new university their recommendation was very clear. It was pretty explicit that the two universities then, NUS and NTU, were essentially training people for the workforce, which was for yesterday and today. They were not very big on training graduates for tomorrow. 

So our mandate was to create a new kind of graduate. From day one, our graduate had to be visibly different, absolutely different from NUS and NTU. So everything that we did had to reflect that the way we formulated ourselves, the way we appointed colleagues, the way we structured ourselves, and so this also then permeated into admissions. So we came up with the idea that every single person we take in will have to be interviewed by a minimum of two professors, could be three sometimes, though we thought that three professors sitting and interviewing one poor candidate could be a bit intimidating. And each interview would be half an hour. Theoretically, it was 15 minutes on our side, the profs asking the candidate questions and these things, and the next 15 minutes actually was on the candidate's side. And quite often, we had very good, positive vibes about the person who actually tries to exhaust the 15 minutes on the other side, because class participation was of the essence in the new formulation of assessment. We decided that examinations were pathetic; especially examinations that put 1,000 people in the room and said just do this. That's old-fashioned, outmoded thinking. It still persists, I'm afraid, but what can I say? But our real thrust was professors are going to decide how these students are going to be assessed, but a couple of thing to be put in place, such as class participation was going to be essential. And we were allowed to go up to 40 percent for class participation, with a minimum, minimum of 25 percent. I think this has been modified over time. We can talk about that a bit later. 

We also thought that going forward, the individual no matter how super intelligent or genius he or she is will learn and must learn, if he's going to be successful, to work in teams. So the other thing we became big on was group projects. So we tried to see how we are going to make this work. And so when we interviewed potential students, we had the academic results there we had in those days, they sat for the SAT, there were of course cut-off points when we interviewed somebody, we put that aside. So that 30-minute interview became critical to a person being admitted or not. And we offered people admissions on the spot, which I think was very, very good, and I have actually written to Cristina [Cristina Elaurza] now to say that maybe we should bring that back. If some professors were very young and very junior, not so used, may not be happy or comfortable doing that, then at least that privilege should be given to a few of us so that we can compete with others who are now using this tactic which we used in 2000 to get students in. I mean NUS is doing it. Yale-NUS is doing it, those kinds of things. So, in order to compete with them effectively today, we need to bring something like that back and not make people wait a week or two weeks. That's too long for the new candidate who's being offered places from Cambridge to Princeton to NUS. SMU mustn't say, sorry, we don't care who is accepting you, as far as we are concerned, you wait. That does not sit well with parents and candidates. 

We were very fond of candidates who could speak well. We thought that in the new world of the new millennium, communication is going to be very powerful. You can have the best credentials in the world academically, but if you couldn't communicate in ways that a good conversation carried itself, for example, you're not going to go very far in the new employment scene. And I think we have been vindicated because our first three, four cohorts were so good in communication that employers loved them, they snapped them up straight away.