I AM a student at a local university, majoring in statistics and applied probability, and I am supposed to graduate this month.

In my last semester, I took a module taught by a visiting professor.

Halfway through the module, I realised that I did not have as much talent in the subject as the rest of my classmates.

I decided to seek help from the professor and asked him if he could upload part of the answers to the tutorials he had gone through with us as he spoke too fast in class and we sometimes had difficulty understanding his accent. There were also times when he did not explain why a certain answer given was incorrect.

I did not ask for the complete solutions to be uploaded, but only the numerical answers, as having the complete answers would make us overdependent on them.

To my surprise, the professor said 'no' to my request without explaining why.

I then asked him how I could find out whether I had answered the tutorial questions correctly. His reply was: 'Based on your own understanding of the module.'

But how would I ensure if my understanding of the module was correct, I asked him. He gave me a shrug.

I was not satisfied with his answers and asked if he could help me check through my answers to see if I had understood any part of the module incorrectly.

Again, he said no.

In the end, I failed the module.

I am utterly disappointed with the fact that my efforts to help myself were met with such indifference.

I cannot help but wonder if I would have done better had the professor been kind enough to help me.

What are we paying our school fees for?

Can our local universities really fight with the top universities in Asia, or even the world, if they continue to recruit educators like this?

There are many educators out there who are really passionate about teaching and it is unfair to them if the black sheep, who teach for the money instead of passion, continue to survive in the education sector.

Ms Ng Chiao Luan

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