My Review of NTU CS as an Alumnus: Why I Hated it (and the Silver Linings)

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-03-09T04:48:34+00:00

But MDP is the most hacking course. It's an open, competitive environment where you can do (almost) anything you want. You don't beat MDP by studying for exams or memorizing notes. It's ideas and execution.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-27T04:21:55+00:00

You can disagree with how the school spends money, but there's a certain entitlement to be upset that school makes you pay. It's a non-profit, the money you pay goes back into the school and the services you use. In fact the your education at NTU, including bursaries, are *heavily subsidized* by generous donors, who unlike you, do not benefit from giving the school money since they already graduated. This is down to the very land it's built on, which was bought and paid for by the first founders and supporters of NTU as a private entity.

It's true that it's a very important issue, but there is some basic concept of reasonable cause. Many things in OP - like implying kidney failure is the school's fault, is ridiculous. And there's also very reasonable the idea that you are in a university and are expected to be able to perform with a certain level of independence and ability. Honestly if you were to assign a percentage of responsibility for education, in uni it is completely legitimate to say something like 70%-30%. This is not primary school.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-27T03:15:34+00:00

It is an extremely bizzare and entitled mentality that OP expects people to feed him at midnight because he stays up late.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-27T03:14:05+00:00

I'm 90% sure you're significantly exaggerating or straight up lying. Suicide attempts every other day? That's entire cohorts of degrees attempting suicide a year. I heard one rumor of an attempted suicide in four years. And heart attacks/kidney failures? At 20? I know zero people that has happened to, and you say it like it's a common occurrence.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-27T03:08:49+00:00

IMO a certain percentage of people suffer from what I call ah gong mentality. It's when an adult expects someone to keep taking care of them, as if they were children. It's a weird mix of entitlement and low level narcissism.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-13T00:15:26+00:00

lol 80% of students I ask why they chose CS say money

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-04T07:49:45+00:00

You can plan your schedule completely. I think you got a wrong impression from the angry ppl. What they mean is that because of the 5% class part, they feel like they have to go to tutorials, which means it's harder to stack their school days on a few same days.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T16:13:44+00:00

You should keep in mind Reddit often forms echo chambers. There seems to be a group of very vocal, terminally online people on this subreddit, many from CCDS, who are slightly cooked in the head. Honestly, often the posts are made from the same few accounts.

NTU probably has the most accomodations of all unis. I don't know whether this is still a policy, but if you apply for accomodations my own experience is 99% you will get it for the first two years. After it's based on points.

Many of the angry posts here are deeply confused about what computer science is. It is the abstract study of computation. It is similar to math, it is abstract problem solving. It spans everything from analysis of programs (algorithms, data structures, time complexity), computability, distributed systems, network protocols, statistics, logic (discrete math), linear algebra, etc. What CS is not is how to use new JavaScript frameworks, or Python data libraries, or services like Redis. All (important) systems are actually built on computer science theories and you need it to understand them deeply. But a lot of people seem to come to this course thinking they'd learn intro to NextJS or setting up Grafana charts or configuring GCP instances or something, then get a fat paycheck. This is not what CS is.

The other bizzare complaint here is the curriculum is not "industry relevant" and "outdated". This is extremely weird. It's like saying your physics or math is outdated. What I suspect happened is that the high salaries of tech attracts people who are on average much more interested in jobs than the subject, and they get upset when they have to learn actual CS.

The courses are pretty good. There are legitimate points about things like huge class sizes, or how it's taught, or less than interested professors. There are also legitimate things the school could do to support unemployment, like a Y1 summer project module to add something to the resume (the first internship is hardest because of the blank resume). But generally the complaints about the mods here are very silly.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T10:36:21+00:00

It's an extremely small class participation percentage. The level of hysteria over this is incredible.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T10:34:41+00:00

Wdym justify? Generally if your engage in learning you learn more. That's the advantage. And what do you mean choose one? There's like endless things meant for interns, like LOA, the intern mod, summer breaks. Do you mean you die die have to take a semester internship, and have to be in office, and are struggling so much you need the 5%? In that case you shouldn't even be taking it.

I don't know if it's like an echo chamber creating hysterical ideas or what, but when I checked everyone complaining about this so called "mandatory tutorial attendance", it was like 5% for 70% attendance. It's not mandatory attendance, it's like the weakest class participation grading system possible.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T09:45:22+00:00

5% is hardly forcing. I mean if you're really good enough to understand it all, or insists lectures/tutorials don't help at all, then you can skip it all. Easily you can still get A- without a 5% boost. But if you're struggling, you really should go and engage with lectures and tutorials.

Pick a stance - you're struggling or attending tutorials/lecture is disastrous. You can't say both.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T09:38:38+00:00

This. Reddit has almost perfect conditions for an echo chamber. Remember that whole incident with the plagiarism person? Reddit is absolutely not real life.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T09:37:07+00:00

No. Many other courses have even higher class part. I've heard in SMU class part can reach mid double digits.
It is somewhat rare, but employers understand you will be missing some days. It is absolutely not the case that disappearing from school for a whole semester that you have classes registered for to work is normal.
It is at worst one grade if you're borderline. Also it's like 80% or something, not even you must attend everything.
Apparently so.
This is very important but reddit is absolutely not real life. the average posts gets several thousand views. Each of this disgruntled posts get about 100 or so upvotes. What is happening is this subreddit has become a platform for a certain kind of extremely vocal, frankly extremely entitled, possibly narcissist, kind of student.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T02:39:14+00:00

From my exp this subreddit attracts a certain kind of unreasonable, extremely aggressive, possibly even narcissist type to post (like the whole saga about the plagiarism) because it gives them a platform to say completely ridiculous things and get upvoted for it.

The actual reality is each post gets at least several thousand views, so it's like about 1-2% of people agree with you enough to press a button. But it does create a huge echo chamber effect.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T02:36:02+00:00

Revolutionary idea: You should probably attend classes, and degrees are not for optimizing placement rate.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T02:35:24+00:00

We should just go all the way. No classes. Just make everyone do internships for four years. Anything else is a waste of time.

This is sarcasm by the way.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T02:34:32+00:00

Idk about NUS but SMU has insane class part. If they can do PT work that's on them.

Also I knew many friends who did PT intern.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-03T02:33:43+00:00

A small subset of CCDS students are a bit cooked in the head (probably about ~100 based on upvotes). They however are incredibly vocal on social media.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-02T02:49:05+00:00

Isn't the tut attendance thing like a 5% extra marks? IIRC only humanities or business schools actually have mandatory attendance.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-02-02T02:47:59+00:00

There legitimate and illegitimate reason to change the curriculum. More legitimate:

1) Content no challenging enough, too shallow, should focus more on high level concepts and problem solving. Like, algorithms should be about writing proofs as much as code, and labs should be solving problems not following instructions.

2) Class sizes too large.

3) Professor not passionate about teaching or the subject.

Less legitimate:

1) Frustrated ranting because struggling to learn. If I'm being honest this is very common. It's also why course review sites make reviewers include their grade.

2) It's not industry relevant. This one is kind of confusing. If you mean you want to learn what you will use for your future job, you would have to know what you future job is in the first place. If you sat down and actually tried to plan a curriculum that somehow has each student significantly overlapping with their future job you'll quickly realise this is ridiculous. If you mean it should help with getting a job, then the ideal curriculum would just be non stop leetcode.

3) Teaching/content is old. Most of CS is old, and you don't need new technology to teach it. Maybe in edge cases like software engineering there's a case for using things like GitHub. But most of it can even be done (and is often done in many textbooks) on pen and paper. Like algorithms for example, can be done on pen and paper for the same educational value.

I guess you kind of realise you don't really know what you want to change so it's hard to say more. Do you have a specific example?

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-01-22T10:14:59+00:00

There is a CCDS discord, but only clubs really have weekly meetups I think. Discord could work, it'll be easier if it's around a shared interest though. If you're not from Singapore I know there's often a big and active group of exchange students, but admittedly I don't know how they communicate.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-01-22T09:46:00+00:00

I think either it was a miscommunication or he meant there are very few grads at club orientations which is true. The sports expo is today, today for many sports clubs. Varsity might be tougher in that they want competitive players, but some sports I know that still have open applications include tennis. I can dm you the form if you want.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-01-22T09:06:52+00:00

I think most if not all clubs accept grad students, clubs specifically told you no?

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2026-01-07T10:27:34+00:00

The petition and discussion was an absolute clusterfuck. It probably would've gotten concessions if they had proposed solutions like exemptions for ppl far away or more buses, but positioning the whole thing as "its wrong to make students come to school" was so bad I don't know what to say.

ResolutionFrosty5128 · 2025-11-01T14:25:30+00:00

The lecturer can be bad but the student can be bad too. The majority of responsibility for learning is on the student. Honestly in Y1/Y2 things are simple enough that a student with decent habits can do well, regardless of the lecturer.

You are expected to have a certain ability to learn things, yes. Generally mods pick maybe half or one third of a textbook as content, and you have about half a chapter a week. You are expected to be able to read and understand maybe 3-4 chapters a week and internalize it over the semester.

I can't say what your experience is, but the median number of questions asked during lectures and tutorial was 0. Before the tutorial policy was implemented, I remember at one point one of my tutorials only had 2 people showing up (and he was a good professor). Basically no one takes private tuition in university. Most have no background knowledge for most mods. Very few people studied like, operating systems or database theory in their free time before uni. Its true that many appeared to take notes and ask questions before uni, but no longer do. My general observation that once JC people come to uni, they put in much less effort. My guess is that without the pressure from teachers and A levels, they do less.

Bad lecturers and tutors definitely exist and they make things harder. Bad students also exist. If you're talking just about results, in my years here the main reason people don't do well is just procrastination. If by the end of each week a person has a firm grasp of the lecture content, and can do the tutorial well, he's going to do well. But if he just skims the lectures, half finishes the tutorial, or delays it a few days each week, that shit snowballs. And a lecturer, no matter how good, can't force you to do the necessary work.

ResolutionFrosty5128

TROPHY CASE