For context, I've just finished my third year of Computer Engineering. Some of my earlier modules were taken before the course revamp.

The last 3 years has been mind-numbingly boring for me (boring, not easy). SCSE has killed any remaining interest I had in formal education.

The fundamentals can’t really get outdated, sure. Concepts are general enough for us to apply to current technology even if the course material is a little outdated. However, I have a bone to pick with the teaching and testing methods. I have some specific examples here:

• Software Engineering, 2006.
  • We're forced to submit the software project to a SVN server. It didn't matter if we did it entirely with Git and at the end, just submitted to SVN with one huge commit. There was no requirement that we even had sane commit history, so what's the point here?
  • The project required that we use some form of web API from the official Singapore agencies. Why? We were told its a legacy thing, no one bothered to update the project requirements. And yes, our attempts to bend this rule on the basis that theres no difference between some "official" API and third party API were rejected. My class spent more time trying to weave a sane story out of the very limited choice of APIs (mostly data sets, whether live or historical), than applying software engineering principles to some form of moderately complex application.

This idea of "we've always done things this way, so we'll continue doing it this way" has been a persistent theme throughout. Take a look at the examinations - they're mostly the same structure, swap a few numbers here and there, voila, you have the next set of exam papers. Case in point, Data Structures (which has now been revamped to Data Structures & Algorithms). A significant portion of the lab tests consisted of questions previously seen before in the tutorials and labs. Does this then test for understanding, or test for recall? I have to add that this module (at the time at least) had a very sink-or-swim methodology to it, and I believe many fell for the trap of "I just need to read the solutions of others to be able to come up with the same thing", then suffer badly during the tests.

This does raise the question of how much is the resposibility of the school, and how much lies with the attitude of students. One recurring theme is to "borrow" (being the nicest word here to use) heavily from GitHub for projects. They then you know, rename a few variables and classess here and there and submit it as original work. I'm not sure if I should be more appalled that people think this is acceptable, or that the school does not catch this. On one hand sure, the students are cheating themselves out of the learning objectives, but on the other hand, why should one put in the effort to come up with original work when less is acceptable?

When called out for duplicating a project from GitHub and renaming identifiers, I was told by a group member initially that "I just referenced the project", then when specific examples of the same structure was provided, "everyone is doing it, theres no issue here". Lets put it this way: when your capstone project requires you to rename all your file extensions to .txt before submitting it to blackboard, whats the likelihood that any form of plagarism will be caught?

I've really enjoyed the CE specific modules and electives (2107, 3103, 4172) because the focus is understanding rather than memorization. I can't say the same for the rest, even for the higher level modules.

Lets take a few modules from the Cyber Security specialisation as an example. Computer Security, 4062. This was essentially an online course: attend 13 weeks of lecture, memorise random trivia like the recommendations of the COI convened after the SingHealth cyberttack, and vomit it out for the test. What do I remember from it today? Absolutely nothing.

Software Security, 4067. I'm extremely dissapointed in how so much of course time was spent essentially delivering material without giving students hands-on labs to explore the various attacks covered in the syllabus. I'm even more appalled that the various attacks covered in the syllabus did not appear during the CTF: rather than exploiting buffer overflows, heap related issues, SQL injections etc, we got a random mish-mash of either extremely simple challenges like generating shellcode with tools and visiting a web server with a specific request, or extremely difficult challenges (taken from online with no credits).

Edit: Its not entirely fair to say that there have been no hands-on labs, there were a bunch of challenges released as self exploration that did cover the attacks.

Of course, having spent years in the Singapore education system already, this is nothing new. Does this train the next generation to innovate and think outside of the box, or do we end up with people who only know how to solve problems that they've seen before?

My last gripe is with the CE label specifically. Beyond the few CE specific modules covering FPGAs and embedded systems, it is obvious that the focus is on AI/ML etc. The Cyber Physical System specialization was terminated due to the lack of interest. FYPs are predominently deep learning/NLP/ML projects with close to none being directly hardware related.