Evolution of USP’s Curriculum: From “4 + 8” to “3+8+1”

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

The “3+8+1” curriculum was from 2012. Before that, the number of modules was likewise 12, but it was a two-tiered curriculum of first-tier and advanced-tier modules: “8+4”. Of the 8 modules, one of them was the writing module that everyone had to do, and the other 7 modules were what we now call the inquiry-tier modules, distributed over the sciences and humanities. If you were an arts student, you had to do 4 science and 3 arts modules, and if you were a science student, you had to do 4 arts and 3 science modules. For the advanced curriculum, there were 4 modules, which were very strange and we were never satisfied with them, which was a major impetus for “3+8+1”.

Advanced course-based modules (CBMs) were farmed out to the partner faculties and not taught in USP. We in USP had to get our partner faculties interested to teach USP students in the major. For example the English department, we had to persuade them to teach an advanced module in English for the English USP students, which was a very small group. Those modules were upper-level disciplinary modules that were very specialised, for example “Carl Jung and literature”. The body of students was very small – these advanced CBMs had like four students in them. They had to do 4 of those, though you could do them through ISMs.

Those advanced modules were not very well controlled by USP because they weren’t taught by us. Things like how they taught it and their objectives were outside our purview and it felt like we were washing our hands off the advanced modules. USP did try to develop some advanced modules on our own – my gender class originally was one of those modules, that’s why it was a level-3000 module. We tried to offer some advanced modules taught by faculty members that more consciously aligned with USP objectives and could also be more open to other majors.

That old curriculum was also the time that we introduced the University Scholars Seminar (USS). We ran several versions of it before “3+8+1” came in. USS has an interesting history. It was not the first objective, but one of the reasons why it was mooted was because there was a desire to give students an easy class since USP classes were more challenging, so in the beginning it was CS/CU. It was different from the usual USP class because it wasn’t seminar based, instead, it was a big lecture. In those days, it was more of getting students to listen to external speakers from the industry, but that changed over time.

A/P Kang Hway Chuan:

The advanced tier of the “8+4” system consisted of ISMs and CBMs, and there was always a debate on how to structure both of them. As the years went by, we focused more on ISMs than CBMs because we wanted to emphasise research experience for our students. Around the time when I became the academic director, we started to have three tracks for the advanced curriculum: the Academic Inquiry track, the Bicultural Immersion track, and the Entrepreneurial Development track.

In the Academic Inquiry track, you did the CBMs and ISMs, which most students took. The track split further into the research-intensive programme and multidisciplinary programme.

The Bicultural Immersion track gave us the impetus to collaborate with partner universities. Many of our partner universities originated in that era, such as Peking University’s Yuanpei College, Delhi University’s Hindu College and Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Waseda University, and Seoul National University. The focus was on cultural immersion in the partner university. Particularly, we wanted to encourage students who wanted to work in Northeast Asia to go for this track.

The Entrepreneurial Development track is the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme, which would count towards the advanced curriculum requirements. Since NOC was already set up at that time, we took advantage of that. However, we also wanted our students to be able to go for NOC without coming back one year later and having their graduation delayed. When NOC was first set up, there were lots of discussion; we asked students who went on NOC what they learned. We wanted to find out if there was any academic content in NOC; we were conservative in that we wanted to be really sure that students were learning something substantive overseas that could replace the advanced curriculum – we weren’t 100% convinced at the time.

A/P Kang Hway Chuan:

It was different for each university; exchange programmes didn’t exist back then. For Delhi University, we approached its top colleges like Lady Shri Ram College for Women and Hindu College; which are part of the University of Delhi. What helped was that we already knew some people from the university like Prof Raj Pandit, who had come to USP to teach sometimes. I also approached Waseda University to set up a double-degree programme. Seoul National University invited us to give a talk about interdisciplinary learning and liberal studies when they were setting up their College of Liberal Studies.

At the time, China, Japan, and Korea were clearly booming and we wanted to be sure that our students could work there. Our first student who visited China wanted to become a journalist for papers working on Northeast Asia, and she did end up working in China after graduating. We also saw a gap – which maybe we didn’t successfully fill – in South and Central America. However, the language barrier was a problem and this region never really took off in our overseas programmes. One of our USP students is the first Singaporean student to visit Mexico for exchange and she had to learn Spanish on her own; we might have been over-exploratory in this regard.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

The curriculum review was initiated in 2010 when we moved to UTown. To contextualise at that time, Prof Richardson was director, and his deputy director was Philip Holden. I was in the CRC and the idea of curriculum review was to identify weaknesses in the existing curriculum and decide on how to solve them.

We decided that writing shouldn’t the only compulsory class. We thought about how there was a need for a complementary class so that USP students learnt how to reason both with words and numbers, and that’s how a compulsory Quantitative Reasoning (QR) class found its way into the new curriculum. We also decided to formalise USS, and therefore we ended up with three foundational classes. USS ran for a few years before “3+8+1” came about, so at least it existed. But QR was set up from scratch for “3+8+1”, and that was challenging: we had to set up a QR team just like we did with WCT. Scientists and social scientists already used quantitative methods, but it was a new concept to try and teach QR. In the early days of QR, we relied on joint appointees from Mathematics and Statistics; it was a first-year class so we needed people immediately.

Given that the old curriculum had the weird four advanced modules, we were clear that we wanted to take that back. Before “3+8+1”, USP was in effect a three-year programme because when the students did CBMs in their third and fourth years, they kind of just disappeared from the programme in a way. In those years, the programme was quite heavy with second and third-year students. We needed a module that brings the graduating students back into the fold – that’s essentially what a capstone module does. It was also important because we were moving to the residential component. In 2011, we were going to move to UTown and we don’t want to have a programme where students get to their fourth year and disappear.

Everything else fell into place and the majority of the “old” modules became inquiry-tier. I think the three tiers that we laid out had a logical sequence. Hindsight is 20/20, but the old curriculum with the first and advanced tiers doesn’t say anything about the function of the modules. With “3+8+1”, we could articulate that the first tier was about the foundational skills, and you’re supposed to apply these foundational skills in the inquiry tier. In the final tier, you have a reflection tier that looks back at everything. Since students have diverse backgrounds, we can never have an overly progressive structure, since everyone had a different schedule that differed so much from discipline to discipline.

But foundational, inquiry and reflection had a bit of progression to it but not too much, and we set loose schedules and timelines. You had to do WCT by Year 1, and QR by the first semester of Year 2. Ideally, you should do those before you do inquiry, but all of that was in consideration of the fact that you can’t be too controlling over the order of modules. “3+8+1” was mooted as part of the curriculum reform initiated by Prof Richardson, who was the new director at the time, and spearheaded by Philip Holden who was the deputy. Discussions took place from 2010 to 2012 and the new curriculum was approved for implementation in 2012.

 I’ll take credit as the person who branded the structure as “3+8+1”. In the CRC, we were thinking about how to explain it to students; I suggested putting numbers to the structure and the admin office (I think Ai Lian, in particular) made a graphic to explain how the curriculum should look for students. I’m a little bit biased as I was most involved in that, but looking back, “3+8+1” was way more coherent than the previous version. “Let’s account for QR becoming a big thing, let’s keep in mind that USS should be an early place for synthesis when you’re bringing QR and WCT together, and let’s keep in mind that there should be some kind of capstone at the end.” In my mind, “3+8+1” is the purest expression of what USP is. Certainly, it had some issues, and of course, if USP had continued we would probably have found some ways to revamp it towards its next stage of evolution.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

The values dovetailed during the same period as our “3+8+1” structure. John Richardson was quite intentional about having those discussions about what the overall pillars of USP should be – back then, it was just CCE. The letters can come across as more “marketing” or “branding”, but I would say that from 2010 to 2014 we took quite a systematic approach, partly taught to us or necessitated. We had a lot of external reviews at that time, and one of the things that these external panels urged and taught us to do was to take seriously that programme outcomes shouldn’t be empty words; we should discuss internally how every aspect of this programme contributes to the outcomes.

For example, if you decide that CCE is what your programme wants to achieve, then every module has to articulate how it contributes to CCE. The international programmes contribute towards “Engagement” – how? The answer needs to be specific: what do we mean by engagement, how do we ensure not just the programme in theory, but every student who does the international programme works towards engagement? There was a lot of systematic work done to align every aspect of the programme to its outcome.

This part we didn’t actually fully finish, but the next logical thing to do was to study our own success, or lack thereof. Now that we’ve done the previous steps of defining the programme outcomes and aligning our courses to the outcomes, we want to see if we’re succeeding. For various reasons, this last part we never got to doing in a systemic way.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

It was a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, probably the way it should be, slightly messy but quite satisfying. It wasn’t done in a vacuum, there was no abstract hypothesising that “we want these four values”. It was more of thinking about the modules we have and looking at what they teach or encourage in the students, and figuring out what they had in common. There was a lot of actual work in thinking and writing the outcomes in a retreat, and there was a moment when it clicked into place, and more or less everyone decided that it worked.

 My memory is that there was kind of one exception to this process, but in a happy way. There was one Open House at which our admin team suggested that the main tagline should be “Curiosity Wanted”. You can probably still see some collaterals with that tagline. Thus, strictly speaking, that value came a bit more from a “branding” occasion. But I think at the next retreat, “curious” became, by agreement, entrenched.

 The climate was that we were relatively secure as a programme. All the soul-searching was self-dictated: “let’s figure it out” instead of the university telling us what to do. We were able to say “let’s look at what we already do, derive the principles from there, and use these changes to align the modules to these principles”. Academics seldom do branding, but looking back many of them did feel that CCE felt like the right descriptions of what we were doing and were fairly uncontroversial.

A/P Kang Hway Chuan:

I started that conversation. I got people like Kuldip Singh, Peter Pang, Yap Von Bing, and other people already teaching in USP to start teaching QR. We approached our faculty members teaching in the Quantitative Reasoning domain of the existing modules to figure out what we felt was lacking in students taking those modules.

The outcome of the QR module was thus for students to learn how to think quantitatively; as a tool, QR is meant for you to gain insight. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic.: you can do some modelling of the system of the population and the virus and what you put into the modelling is mathematical and statistical rigour. But out of the modelling of this complex system – with many interacting factors in well-defined, but not necessarily simple ways – you could get an outcome that you may not intuitively arrive at merely by verbal reasoning. You could gain quantitative insights into questions like whether wearing masks and doing social distancing have any effect, and how long we should implement such measures.

We thus wanted students to get the quantitative skills necessary to gain insight in complex problems that they wouldn’t be able to gain from verbal reasoning. We’re not looking at physics textbook-style questions, which you can understand well after some time, or simple problems like the movement of the planets which is well-understood. QR deals with complex problems where elements interact in a simple way but result in qualitatively different situations. In this sense, QR is definitely a complement to WCT.

A/P Kang Hway Chuan:

ISMs were always there; now, we’re very clear about the ISMs’ interdisciplinary nature, but back then there were fewer constraints. For example, you could do research in chemistry and that would count towards your USP graduation requirements. On the other hand, over time ISMs have shifted towards being defined and driven more by students than faculty members. Before, ISMs were more traditional research projects in academic lines of inquiry, framed by faculty members. Now we’re seeing more topics being framed almost exclusively by students such as those researching USP itself, which is good to see.

As we are an interdisciplinary programme, even though students would be doing some ISM in chemistry or engineering, we would want them to learn some meta-analytical skills. Our role in the ISM, as opposed to the faculty department, is to make push students to be more reflective on what their research is about, how research is done, and how the pieces fit into the bigger picture, not just focusing on disciplinary knowledge.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

Reflection was always quite difficult to figure out, though we had the luxury of time before students started taking USR since it was a Year 3 or 4 module. “3+8+1” was launched in 2012, I believe, and Reflection had to be ready to go by 2014 or so. We knew USR was part of the curriculum and we knew the function of the class, but how you would actually teach that was a work in progress. We mooted a few sample module proposals of how to teach reflection. One went in the direction of asking broad questions that transcend disciplines, for example, “what does it mean to be human?” put up by Prof Anh Tuan Nuyen from the Philosophy Department, who has since retired, designed that.

I also did one – though it probably would never have worked – that was very meta: a sample class called Evidence. The idea was that if you do a capstone module, your students are in Years 3 and 4, so they’re going deeper into their disciplines, so we don’t want them to feel like they are being pulled back to USP to do something just because they have to. So this version of the reflection class would ask students to look at their major work, for example, their Honours Theses, but from this meta-angle. They would have to discuss their Honours Theses, and reflect on questions like what evidence is and what counts as evidence in their field. It would be a class that brought students from different disciplines together and examine a common topic of evidence, from different disciplines like law and history.

A/P Lo Mun Hou:

The curriculum review and move to UTown were coincidental in the sense that directors did six-year terms and we were searching for a new director as we were moving to UTown. There was resistance to moving to UTown, as some students were wondering what’s the point of changing to a residential model. That probably was a little bit imposed, but we took the opportunity and decided to revamp the curriculum at the same time.

Looking back, my sense is that we didn’t capitalise on that as much as we could have. The residential college planning, I would say, wasn’t quite as integrated. The planning to move to the residential college started early, maybe 2009 or 2008. During those years, Prof Peter Pang was the director, but he was nearing the end of his 6-year term. We had a deputy director who oversaw the move to the residential college, but his job from Day One was quite restricted to this project of the move, so it was perhaps not very integrated. The planning was very rushed as well because it was kind of a university-led project, I don’t know if they had time to do as much consultation as they could have.

UTown was originally meant to be built and used as the Youth Olympic Village 2010, I believe. My sense was that NUS got this money to build UTown from the government, on the condition that it was to be the athletes’ village for the Youth Olympics. I don’t think they managed to build it well in such a short amount of time.

One of the things that bothers me which is pretty basic was the tagline about integrating living and learning. At some point, I wondered why are there no classrooms in the residential buildings. There are two buildings, there are classrooms and there are residential buildings, but why not have classroom spaces in the residential buildings, to give faculty a reason to walk to the college. For a few years, we tried very hard to make masters commons a classroom, but it wasn’t built for that. The dining hall in my undergraduate college had a room that you could go into if you wanted somewhere quieter for a dinner conversation. Why didn’t we section off a part of our dining hall? If you are trying to infuse learning into the residential features, you need some architectural features.

The planning of integrating residential living into the curriculum could have been better, probably wasn’t as consultative as it could have been. I would also say that we were a bit complacent, or at least had other more pressing problems. One of the rhetoric that we had was “in the old Chatterbox, students were around all the time, it was as if they were living there all the time – it will be a natural transition to residential learning”. Looking back, it shouldn’t have been left just like that. We had some piecemeal efforts, however, for example doing more tie-ups with overseas universities since students are now available 24/7. I vaguely remember Dr Johan holding an 8pm class that allowed for teleconferencing with a tie-up with an American university.

So I think there was an express wish that the move to a residential model would impact the curriculum. But there were a lot of reasons why, in my opinion, we didn’t quite manage to “integrate living and learning” as much as we could have.