I am beginning to become so glad that I did do my bachelor’s degree in Germany, or at least not in China. It seems like there is plenty of stuff messed up with undergraduate studies in Hong Kong. And the HKUST is probably still the best university in Asia, so this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems like everyone here is only interested in grades. Grades again are measured by pointless exams that verify how well people have learned fact knowledge. Exams here focus on details and technicalities instead of applications on real world application. And as we all know, facts are the somewhat “boring part” of the memory, the declarative memory. Sure, facts are important to some degree. It’s handy and without a doubt also necessary to have some facts at hand all the time during your day. However, detailed knowledge about stuff usually is not what really helps you. It helps you only in producing standardized results. It helps you in reproducing dogma, “which is the result of other people’s thinking”. What really drives you forward though, is “thinking different”. Sorry for borrowing two quotes here from Apple, but they describe the core of this issue very well.
Right now, the first midterm exams are taking place. So everyone is learning, rushing around the campus. While I think having frequent midterms is a great idea, the university encourages people to learn facts all the time by doing this.
Only grades count
What’s fundamentally wrong with the system is that for every kind of application at the university, only grades count. Whether you want to do an exchange or enter an honors program, it’s all about grades. And those grades, again, are based on how well you reproduce facts. Together with exams all the time, this means that students are the most part of their 3-4 years of undergraduate studies spending their time on something that we in the Western world have found to be secondary.
The students do not have time to build any serious skills. There is no time to ask about why something is. If maybe what the teacher says is not up to date any more. If maybe what the teacher says is just not a good idea at all. In humanities classes, people learn even more facts instead of discussing the topics among other and reflecting on it. I remember, last week in class we were talking about how to build a software that translates one language into another (like Google Translate). People were suggesting to add more and more levels of abstraction and features. Finally, I asked the question “what is the real goal here”. It seemed like everyone else was just following the path that the professor intentionally lured them on. It appeared that “why and what exactly are we doing here” was not the first thing that come to their minds. Of course not. They have been programmed to just follow orders without first rethinking them. Note the emphasis on first.
Origins of the Military Style
I am not sure where this military-style not thinking about stuff comes from. I noticed it during my time at CDTM, the Center of Digital Technology and Management. The CDTM is an interdisciplinary institution that brings engineers and business students together. I think too many business life conventions were just accepted as OK. At CDTM it was mostly details that annoyed me, so I kind of ignored them as the benefits of trying to study how business students work seemed a valuable trade. Still, I always felt strange about it.
The issue with this military way of doing things is that form seems to be more important to people than content. I very often had the impression that the way how slides look like, how we dress and if there are slide numbers on every slide were more important during presentations than what we had to say. Also, no one seemed to understand that having slide numbers, slide headers and all that useless nonsense is plain out wrong. Even further, the business guys always printed out slides and treated them like a script. That again, is wrong. Instead, the content of the slides and what you say verbally should be disjunctive sets. Slides also never should be distributed after the presentation. Instead, a proper script that explains things in full sentences instead of bullet points should be distributed. It’s impossible to express something properly with bullet points and slides with bullet points distract the attention away from your speech. So having slides as script and presentation is a comprise that actually makes everyone unhappy.
Of course, the slides example is rather a detail. And it’s subject to personal taste. But it shows the attitude. And I think this attitude can make you blind towards the real goal, so you should avoid it.
I would not quite jump to the conclusion that this misapprehension is inherent to business schools or maybe systems that are influenced by the United States. However, both CDTM and the HKUST try to copy an American system and both of them are dominated by business people. And both institutions seem like they did not understand everything before copying it. It’s somewhat like Windows, which is a tasteless copy of the Mac, or Chinese fakes. Sorry, for this strong comparison, but now maybe you’re listening 
I still love all my friends at HKUST and CDTM and am grateful that they let me study there. Still, I hope that more care is applied in the future when copying styles from the United States.
Try More
I think we all can do better. People should start discussing. People should accept that hours may be wasted on pointless philosophical discussions. But these discussions might also turn into very fruitful, interesting discussions that they did not appear to become within the first two minutes. People should try more.
Try to be different, not just better and better at the same game. Not more features, more money, more resources are what makes you happy. Quality makes you happy. And you can’t buy it. It’s expensive. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s uncertain.
You can encourage it, but not plan it. You can go that way, but you never know if and where you will arrive.
After all, it seems to me like European-styled education, which offers more time to ask questions and get quality, is the better way to go. In Asia, they rush through everything too fast, but do not really learn anything at all, because they can’t really transfer their knowledge. That also is similar to what other people, both Asians and Westerners have told me countless times.
