Taken in AY 18/19 Semester 1
1.5 hours lecture
Assessment:
- Tutorial Forum 20%
- Museum Reflection (700 words) 20%
- Term Paper (1800 words) 35%
- Movie Reflection (800 words) 25%
Took this module as it is compulsory for all university students to take general education modules (understanding about things unrelated to your major). I also took this module because there are no physical tutorials for this module. There are only 5 online tutorials where you are required to write a short response to a forum question. It also isn’t necessary for you to go the lectures because there are NO EXAMS for this module and you can retrieve whatever info you need for the tutorials from the readings/slides which explains why there are over 400 people taking this module (1 bid point though guess many people think that this is going to be a boring module).
For the online forum, there will be tutorials on weeks 3,5,7,9,11. The tutor will post the question on a Friday afternoon (after the lecture) and you have more than 2 days to post a response to that question. Often there will be word limits put in place so that people won’t write excessively long answers (which is good for lazy people). More often than not, you will have to do some readings to answer the questions or you are also able to answer them if you have some contextual knowledge about Singapore history. Most people don’t bother providing quality responses to the questions so it is easy to score well for this component if you put in some effort.
The Museum reflection assignment requires you to make a trip down to either the NUS museum or the National museum and write an essay on a designated exhibition. The exhibition at NUS was really hard to understand because there weren’t many artefacts or explanations so it is better to go to the National museum (you have two exhibitions to choose from instead of one). You are supposed to write how the exhibition has contributed or challenged your understanding of Singapore’s history through the use of elements in the exhibition. This assignment wasn’t really demanding as you are only required to write 700 words for this so it should be relatively fast to do (you have the whole recess week to do it). In the end, I got a B+ for this assignment which was rather decent considering the amount of effort I put into this.
The hardest part of this module has to be the term paper. In this paper, you are required to discuss on any form of popular culture in Singapore. You are also required to interview someone who has experienced this form of popular culture. In addition, you also need to find 5 academic sources to support your main argument. I would suggest starting on this assignment early (3 weeks to do it) by reading the journals on possible sources that you might be using and finding the similarities between the different journals so that you are able to construct a strong thesis for this assignment. I did a research on music which was rather easy to do due to the abundance of sources. In the end, I got an A- for this assignment which was satisfying. All the time spent reading the journals has not been wasted.
For the final assignment, you will have to do a movie reflection from a selection of local movies, exploring the reasons why these films have been made. This is not a standard film review as you are required to have an argument towards an underlying issue. The lecturer will show a movie during one of the lectures so you can just review that movie if you have no time to watch it on your own. You are also required to make use of 3 academic sources to support your points for this assignment. In the end, I got an A- for this paper.
Overall, this module is definitely one of the best modules that you are going to do in NUS. Although I didn’t really learn a lot from this module (wanted to take another module that seemed interesting but seems hard to score), it was a good opportunity for me to practise writing again (after more than 2 years in the army) and I got to take this module with my friends from another faculty so it is worth it!
Expected Grade: A-
Actual Grade: A
Life 