One of my friends has done a good job in breaking down the implications of this year's overwhelmingly high number of highscorers. While all those who did well receive my heartiest congratulations if they know about it, I'm particularly worried about the rest. Hence, a deeper discussion entails.
Our school could be taken to be something like a developing economy. A new country trying to reach the "developed" stage and pushing as hard, or even harder than China. With our old principal, this might be easy to imagine. He treats us like a business anyway. It's then not surprising that we suffer a number of similar woes. We have what you might call a "widening income gap". The average points for this year hasn't risen by much despite doubling the number of our top scorers. I wouldn't be surprised if the standard deviation has risen alot too.
We now have around 50 students in total with 45s in the world produced from our school. Most schools don't even have a single one. Our ranking stands high, yes, and that is much to be proud of. But our land falls short, and so does most of our students' financial backing. It is highly likely that many of them will seek education locally. Maybe not such a large percentage of 45s, but the 44s are a huge number (100+) and then 43s, and so on (the usual bell curve). As we go down the ladderboard, we'll just about find that 40 points or so might not get much chance. And mind you, 40 points is already very good. 38 gets you an interview by Cambridge fyi...
I didn't think that his strategy might be helpful here, but check it out. It's extremely apparent that our local market is getting oversaturated with too many high scorers from our school, pushing the percieved value of scores down. Inflation in one word. The dark reality, while most would not like to think about, is that in order for you to be considered good, you must have many others who are inferior to you.
I, for one, am rather lucky to have a wider market and hence have adopted, unintentionally, a blue ocean strategy by firstly applying to a less popular scholarship, and have been awarded. (I shall not elaborate too much on that, but there's more than what is apparent here.) And secondly, choosing the USA to study. If you were to rank regions in the world which are most popular for education for Singapore students, first comes local of course, next is the UK, followed by USA, Australia, Canada, and others like France, Germany (europe bascially). USA has the most places of course, among all these countries, not to mention the largest number of top universities.
If you realised, I've so far only concentrated on the students from our school competing amongst ourselves in procuring university places. Why? Well, universities are rather different from pre-tertiary education. They don't just rank all the students that apply to them and take like the top x students where x is the number of places they have. All universities to an extent (some more than others) take into consideration of student body diversity. This includes, besides ethnicity, your country (for overseas), school, and possibly income group. Hence, you never really break free from internal competition with your schoolmates. What's worse is that given NS, with THREE possible chances to apply to the universities, up to THREE batches will be competing with each other for places. I have been considering these many chances to be good, but if there are more people like me... then it will begin to work against my hopes. Well. Hopefully not.
While I have not much competition coming from my school for where I'm applying, I still have the rest of Singapore to contend with, although that is possibly less to worry about than the others have.