2015 results

The results for the year 2015 O and N lvl are out already. Just like last year, I decided to keep a proper account of my student's results. This is not meant for marketing purpose (even though it can be), but honestly, it's more for my sake. There are good times and bad times in this work that I do, and hopefully when I'm feeling down, I can look back and look at the good I've done.

I had a total of 11 graduating students with me tutoring 15 subjects with them. Out of the 11 students, 10 are express O lvl and 1 is from the Normal (acad) stream.  The students are with me for various duration; some stayed with me for 2 years while the shortest duration is only 1.5 months. 

Here's the breakdown of the results:

A1 - 6.7%
A2 - 80.0%
B3 - 13.3%
B4 and below - 0.0%

86.7% of the students I taught managed a A2 or better. Again, we see this weird trend where a lot of students are getting a bulk of A2 to B3 and not many getting A1. Because this is the 2nd year where it happened since I started tracking, I think it's a great cause for concern. Perhaps it's no longer sufficient to get 75% to get A1 these days with the current grade inflation situation. To get A1 for emath, we already need perhaps 95%, so what's next? 99%?


I'm actually very happy for my students this year. Here's the more memorable cases:

1. G had a fantastic showing for his N lvls. He's one of the rare ones that managed to skip the dreaded O'lvl and go straight to N lvls. I've always said that it's an uphill battle for N lvl students to get a better score for O lvl simply because it's not a fair fight. You have only 1 year to adjust to the more demanding and qualitatively different syllabus while the rest of the express stream had a full 2 years to do so. It's like a newbie fighting in the land reserved for the pro. Glad that he did so well that he can skip the Olvls. Will miss our weekly talk about anything under the sun and his crazy curiosity about the world about us.


2. I met S only 1.5 months before his Olvls. Since it's only like 6 to 7 weeks before his exams, we had to rush through the entire syllabus to prepare him well. His foundation is very very weak, almost non-existent. It doesn't help that he is usually so worn out by his crazy revision schedule organised by his school for the weaker students. As a result, he is always dozing off during lessons while I'm always rushing to meet the timeline in order to cover as much as possible! It's impossible!

I fully expected him to get at best B3 for his combined science, but he outdo my expectations and got an A2. Very happy for him. Unfortunately, it's only those subjects that he sought help that managed to get As and Bs. The rest didn't do as well. Not sure if he can get into poly.


​3. D is a under confident girl when I met her. She always thought she couldn't make it. Perhaps years of constant bad results make you reluctant to even attempt. After letting her experience several small success, she gets better and better, to a point where I thought she don't need any more help from me. But after talking to her, I realised that she needed help in another subject (which I can teach as well), so I offered to change our lessons to that. I told her it's pointless getting just one A; you need everything to be fairly good. In the end, she got two A2 for the subjects I taught her and overall score of 12. That's super super decent to me. 

I hope she goes forward with better confidence in her own abilities to overcome life's problems.


IB results came out earlier, but I only have one student taking SL maths. She is really really struggling with math but I think she did put in the effort during the last few months and managed to score a 5 out of 7. That is with a combined score of 32 out of 45. Not the crazy full score you see from the ACS side, but hey, she's happy with her results and can get to where she wants to. And to me, that's good enough.

So that's it. Now we wait for Mar period of the release of the Alvl results.