By Amelia Tan

IT IS now official: The name Raffles Institution (Junior College) will cease to exist.

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Singapore's premier school will go back to using its original name for all its six levels of students - Raffles Institution, or RI for short.

RI, for boys in their four years of secondary school, and Raffles Junior College (RJC), for students in the two years of co-educational pre-university study, merged in January last year.

The name it took on was RI, but, to differentiate its secondary section from its pre-university one, the institution kept the JC name in brackets.

But the RJC name kept creeping into public documents and media reports.

RI principal Lim Lai Cheng said the time has come to move on, 'since staff and students have become more comfortable with the fact that RI is a single institution offering a six-year programme'.

All its students bypass the O levels and graduate with A Levels.

The school has already started using the Raffles Institution name on its official documents, including the school-leaving certificates and testimonials of its graduating classes.

The e-mail domain for its staff is now ri.edu.sg, and the school will soon launch a new website. In the past year, Year One to Four students have had one website and the Year Fives and Sixes, another.

One change visible to all will be in the removal of the Raffles Institution (Junior College) sign from the school's campus in Bishan, said Mrs Lim.

RI, the oldest school here, was set up in 1823. From the 1950s until 1981, it offered mixed-sex pre-university classes.

RJC was founded in 1982 to take over the pre-university classes. Most of the girls there hailed from Raffles Girls' School (RGS), which remains a separate secondary school.

The junior college has made a splash in the academic, sports and co-curricular fields in its 26-year history. Its students often took the top spots at the A-level examinations and won coveted government scholarships.

Asked about losing the 'junior college' part of the name, current Year Five and Six students said 'RI (JC)', the name in use in the last year, was useful when they had to explain that they were in pre-university.

But they said it was time to use the RI name, since people were now familiar with the school's merged identity.

They said the Year Fives and Sixes will, however, still have their own 'culture', one in which both sexes make important contributions to the school.

Vice-president of the RI Students' Council Tan Juan Min, who is from RGS, said: 'Many girls take on important roles in RI. Four out of five house captains this year are girls too.'

But the school's alumni are less enthusiastic.

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Corporate banking officer Lim Zi Xuan, 24, said: 'The RI school culture is so strong. I think it will be hard for the college section to have a distinct identity.'

Physicist Ng Weiyi, 26, said: 'The dissolution of RJC is definitely sad. I do, however, understand the need for continual rebranding.'

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