http://theliberatingtruth.wordpress.com ... mber-1159/The Academic Blacklist photos will be taken down by 2nd September 11:59
Posted on September 2, 2010 by theliberatingtruth| 6 Comments
Firstly, I’m very sorry to disappoint the people who were attracted by some hyperlink to reach my blogs. As I felt that I have gone too far this time in condemning FT students, I would be removing their certificates from the blacklist at 11:59am as the blog post had reached Temasek Review. I do not want to give the school negative publicity since it would be unfair to target NTU alone. However the lack of contribution by NUS students did made it seemingly looked like the blog section was targetted at NTU. Nevertheless, if anyone is interested in the actual blacklist’s names, certificates and photos, I can still send them to you by email if there are requests. Contact me at
[email protected] and I can send you the list of students submitted to me previously. But I would seriously refrain you from posting the pictures on the web.
Initially, the content of the articles regarding Academic poisons were meant to let Singaporeans be aware of lurking issues within our local universities campus. I did not expect that many Singaporeans had in fact shared the same opinion as me and decided to publicized my blogs on Straits Times and Channel News Asia forum. The viewership shot up miraculously within weeks after the academic blacklist was up and I really appreciate the efforts done by our fellow Singaporeans to help my blog reached a larger target audience and it definitely helped raise awareness of this prevalent issue that is happening in our local universities every year.
However, seeing my blogs reached our state media channels had also put some kind of pressure on me and my co-author. After all, our state media’s website is easily accessible by many foreign countries as well as Singaporeans. The blacklist would therefore pose a very bad image on Singaporeans, particularly if foreigners know that their children are being targeted and monitored for their behavior. My blog views for the 1st 2 days of September overshot the 31 days of views in August and it showed that a lot of people have accessed my website through the publicity in CNA and ST forums. Publicity in the anti-regime website Temasek review would only add fuel to the already condemned foreign students.
Several readers have claimed that I am inciting racism by targeting IIs in the blacklist. For this, I will reiterate my stance on this. I accept testimonials targeted at any foreign student, not just IIs. There was a Pakistani and 2 Tiongs inside there as well. And I have said, it just happens so naturally that IIs always form the bulk of the Academic Poisons in our local universities.
I have decided to take down the blacklist now and will not be targetting specific FTs openly as precise as before. Nevertheless, I do not encourage Singaporeans to exhibit racial discrimination against IIs just because my blog seemingly made an harmless attempt to spur you on. I had in fact mentioned the groups of Indians as “Academic Poisonous IIs†instead of IIs as a whole. Hence I am not condemning a nationality but a bulk of them whom are known to exhibit bad behaviour.
My intention was never to stake a claim in saying that those places allocated to foreign students should be allocated to local Singaporeans. For our local university to be recognize globally, there has to be 2 important factors:
1. Our university must accept 20% foreign students.
2. They must properly screen those foreign students with a stringent selection process. After all, some foreign students bring about a negative mentality when it comes to school work. There are some who thinks that plagiarism is alright, this can be detrimental to a school’s reputation. There are also other students whom don’t care a damn about coursework and focus their efforts onto the final exam. There was an article on Lianhe Zaobao claiming that students in our local universities, particularly NTU, having heavily plagiarize their thesis and FYP reports. Only by accepting quality students, the research quality of an educational institute can improve.
In future, when you are doing groupwork in your universities, there are some things that you can do to prevent an academic poison from leeching you.
1. Identify the academic poisons and their traits. When you reached the 2nd year of University, do share information with your peers on potential groupwork hazards.
2. When you are forced to group with an academic poison, always remember not to overestimate him. He/she is more useless than what he/she claims to be.
3. Never pass any important work to the Academic poison to do. He/she will have a high chance of either doing nothing, or copying somebody else’s work. If he/she really did copied somebody else’s work, you are going to penalized by the plagiarism check before you even know it.
4. Report to your supervisor immediately, if the academic poison failed to turn up for meetings or tries to pass you plagiarized work. It will be too late if you only decided to take action on the day of assessment or deadline. Most supervisors and professors won’t buy last minute excuses for flops.
Finally, I thank all the support that Singaporeans had gave to The Liberating Truth in the past few months, and we will definitely continue with our FT bashing whenever there are misdeeds reported. I would hope the foreign students mentioned in my blog had their few days of fame in Singapore’s social politics and would certainly reflect on their behavior. If such behaviour continues, there will be a time when another crazy Singaporean like me will start to give them unwanted publicity again.
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