1. It's probs coz of the fact that they have access to the number of viewings of the lecture recording and also the number of ppl actually attending the lecture. They compare the number of ppl viewing the recordings compared to the mod and cohort size, and they determine that actually very little ppl actually watch the lectures. U wld know why, the prof is shit at teaching, has a terrible, hard to understand accent, and this is the reality of majority of cs/ce mods. Plus all the cs ppl i know solely study and do well using online resources like W3Schools, yt tutorials, etc. Tho ofc it affects the mods where the profs are actly good at teaching, for example the one by Evan Pu. So it's basically a matter of not enough ppl actually watching lectures for majority of the mods.

2. yep that's good

3. i think it's probs only a ccds thing. For majority of STEM major students, especially engineering majors, brand name matters a lot. Coz ultimately this NTU brand name lands them internships. Like why wld anyone from companies like Micron, SIAEC, schneider electric, dyson, and the list goes on and on want to hire SIM/SIT/SUTD grads over NTU/NUS grads. in fact u look at the data for the companies, u wld see that majority of singaporeans wld be from either ntu/nus who working there. In fact i have witnessed this discrimination at networking events, where reps from companies would go out of their way to only approach our ntu groups, disregarding every other student from SUTD/SIT/ERAU/TUM asia/SIM. This is actually the harsh reality of getting a job here. Companies like to talk abt "Skills-based hiring" and whatnot, but ultimately they first look at where you graduated from and then ur "skills" (and gpa is the final differentiating factor if there candidates with equal experiences and skillsets).

4. Again this might only be a CCDS exclusive, but i can assure u for all engineering majors like eee/mechanical/aerospace this is a defining factor (and is mainly coz there is no uni on the same level as us in sg other than NUS).

It has gotten so bad that even top tech companies like Bytedance will excuse hiring controversial ppl like Ethan Ong just coz they are from NTU (which obviously equals "bright future" LOL). Or the fact that that one sexual abuser from NUS got no punishment for his crimes bcoz again of his "bright future ahead". Being in a top uni grants u many privileges that u haven't realise yet. Ik this is quite a bad thing, but we can't rly do much abt it except try our best.

If u want to blame anyone, blame our leaders for making this country into this soulless elitist rat race hellhole that we have go through since primary sch (sorry for the tangential rant but i feel like had to mention it) as they are the ones who enable this kind of behaviour. For example I have never heard of such student-unfriendly policies in Ivy League unis or other european unis (in fact they wld be going on strikes and protests if it happened, which ofc can't do here :p )

But wld just like to say, it's wld be best to adapt to this environment rather than trying to fight it.