Singapore newest medical school, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine which is a joint venture between NTU and Imperial College London, has picked its inaugural batch of 54 medical students.
All 54 students (100%) are Singaporeans. They were selected from 440 shortlisted candidates through a series of interviews. More than 800 A-list students have applied to the medical school.
The 54 selected students had almost perfect scores in their interviews and also aced their BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT), exceeding the cut-off requirements needed for entry to Imperial College’s medical programme.
Teaching materials are developed by the Imperial College London, which comprise over 200 e-lectures professionally recorded by professors, clinicians and scientists. Students can access the e-lectures from their iPads.
To encourage active collaborative learning, team-based learning in clusters will be a key feature, including early patient exposure where students will be able to interact with real patients as early as the second month of their first year of study.
The school said that it will gradually increase its annual intake to 150. Classes will start in Aug next month.
In contrast, Singapore’s first liberal arts college, Yale-NUS College which is a joint venture between NUS and Yale, only has 62% of its inaugural batch of 157 students consisting of Singaporeans. The rest, 38%, are foreigners (‘38% of 1st Yale-NUS student batch are foreigners‘).
The percentage of foreign students at 38% is unusually high for a public funded university. PM Lee has promised to cut the university foreign student population to 15% by 2015 (‘PM: Proportion of foreign students in universities going down‘). Prior to the 2011 General Election, the proportion of foreign students in our local universities has always been 20% in the last decade [Link].
Yale-NUS College’s classes will also begin in Aug.
TR Emeritus
*Article first appeared on www.TREmeritus.com