Vesak day email and World Class Facilities at YMCA

On Monday, taking advantage of the Vesak day holiday, I wrote an email to our Danny Toohey in the wee hours of Monday morning to try to put an end to the nonsense to ICT306 Software Architecture. I knew I was going to write to a person whose native language is English. Thus I tried very hard to squeeze as much mileage as I can from my 'O' level English certificate.

And so here is the naked and uncensored content of my message to Mr Danny

Dear Sir,

I will like to bring a matter of great importance to your attention regarding our first 2 sessions for ICT306 Software Architectures.
According to our study guide, we are suppose to cover topic 1 in session 1 and topic 2 in session 2.

However, our first 2 sessions on May 11 and May 13 covered none of the material in the 2 topics. We noted that our lecturer did not use the lecture material on both sessions, prompting the BIS1 class to wonder if the lecturer had access to the study material.

On May 13 night, the study material was made available to the students and we found that what the lecturer had covered were not as what is detailed in the topic 1 and 2 slides. Instead of covering the course info & introduction and client-server architecture, we were given what is best described as a beginner's programming class using Java. I am very sure that after going through 2 trimesters of C and C++ programming, we do not need to be instructed on what is an variable or function.

This is a grave concern as this means that we have been fooled into wasting time to attend 2 sessions which were essentially worthless. That leaves us with less time to actually cover the topics needed for this subject. We are now behind schedule by 2 sessions and we will like to know how are we suppose to be compensate for this.

Right now, we have many questions in our mind that we will like someone to answer.
- Is there going to be 2 make up sessions? Is examinations going to be delayed by 2 weeks?
- Why is the lecturer not given the relevant teaching materials? How can classes start without the relevant materials?
- How come we are not informed about this? Trying to cover things up this way certainly is an insult to me, personally. We are not adolescents, but working adults, so please respect that.

I find this outrageous and very unfair to us. We are full paying students paying with our own money for what APMI Kaplan promised us during orientation as "World Class Education Experience". Unfortunately, for every trimester, things just get worse along the way, to the extend that even the lecture content becomes virtually non-existence to us. If the lecturer starts inventing their own material without telling us that there is no relevance to our examinations, and without our acknowledgment, what is the point of paying and going for classes? This is a serious breach of integrity and trust. We are not trying to be difficult but this clearly sub-standard.

Our next class is on May 20. If the situation does not improve, we will boycott this subject outright since there is no value in attending classes. We have also little faith in the lecturer to deliver the subject material properly after realising that we have been hood-winked.

Please do something about this and give us a satisfactory outcome on this matter.

In protest,

Foong Jia Khang
BIS1

So, the email pretty summed up everything I had to say regarding the matter. To Mr Danny's credit, he reverted back at 10am promising us that he would be looking into it. Obviously, he didn't read my previous email to him which contained the link to Singapore National Holidays. He put in effort to try to ring up everyone in Kaplan but got no response because it's Vesak day here.

In the end, our next lesson on Tuesday was Topic 1 and Topic 2 at YMCA. APMI Kaplan ran out of space and decided to dump us there for the whole week. We heard that they had dumped diploma course students from rumors but never did we imagine that we will get the same treatment. The YMCA building is so sad that even MacDonalds have to close their doors because their business sucks so bad, hence we didn't have high hopes for the facilities there.

At least BIS2 got sent to Meridian Hotel...do APMI Kaplan hate BIS1 so much that they rather save money and dump us at YMCA?

Warning, the pictures taken below sucks because of my sad O2 Atom's lousy built-in camera. I am also too lazy to photoshop them before posting.

Behold the World Class Facilities experience at YMCA !

The classroom didn't come with a projector screen. We have tried to display the projector image on the white board but the resulting glare is so bad that I could feel my migraine coming. I got pissed off and disrupted the lesson until the problem was resolved.

Our AV equipment expert Hui Ming rotated the projector to the right and used the wall as the projector screen. At least my head will not hurt now.

The World Class Facilities at YMCA also came with world class markers. The blue marker was so faint that it was as good as invisible ink and the red marker squeaked so loudly that it hurts my ear drums.

It really brought a sense of deja-vu to me when I first saw the class furniture. These are the same tables and chairs that I had last used during my secondary school days.

We found several test papers below the desks. We got a scholar here doing 4/30 for English. Fantastic, the marker must have finished marking the paper in 1 minute flat.

And there is Internet access... prepaid ... you have to pay the hotel to use their internet facilities. There is also insufficient power points should we all bring our notebooks.

That's all for now, let's see what will happen in BIS1 never ending saga of screw-ups. Some of the BIS1 guys already felt desolated and rejected from the way that we were handled. Our program manager Juiliana had left, making her the 2nd program manager to leave our cursed cohort to our doom. I guess that we are doomed to get a change of program manager every trimester because we are so hard to please.