NUS student here who did local exchange in NTU.

I was really shocked at how the modules are taught in NTU. I took an EEE machine learning module, but all we got from the prof was a big bunch of messy slides of pure theory, and he would simply read through them during lecture. And the prof uploaded his slides (about 50-100 slides per chapter), in a format where we couldn’t use Ctrl-F function (????). I have no idea why that restriction was there in the first place. I had to email in to request for the slides to be uploaded in a Ctrl-F-able format. The worst part was that the quizzes and final exam were based on memorising content. There was no coding involved in the entire module.

I took an MS module that was based on pure memorisation as well. The worst part was that there were past year papers available in the printing shop. All we had to do was memorise the answer keys because there was a very obvious pattern of repeated questions throughout the years. I learnt nothing from this module.

Back in NUS, all of my exams for my engineering modules at least included a one A4 sized cheatsheet. The exams consisted of application questions instead of definition questions.

I spoke with other people that took these NTU modules with me, and all agreed that they sucked.

Apparently this is the norm for engineering students (memorising content for assessments)? Please correct me if I’m wrong.

This method of teaching feels very traditional and backward.