Perhaps apply for an A-Levels resit while waiting for university admission offers. Counsel from a repeat candidate.
The 2022 Private Candidate Registration Exercise recently began on 28 March 2022 and will close several days later on 8 April. It is understandable if the thought of resitting your A-Levels sounds repulsive. Still, it might be wise not to avoid the idea reflexively of emotion altogether. Take a deep breath, and contextualise your situation. If preemptively applying for re-candidacy makes sense, do it.
Hi Friends,
My name is Marcus, and if, halfway through, this message does not prove pertinent to you, I hope you may still share it with those for whom you believe it might be helpful. I am a recent graduate of Yale-NUS College. I also used to be a repeat candidate for the Singapore-Cambridge GCE A-Levels. Over the years, via word-of-mouth referrals, I have been informally supporting students who struggled on the road after their first set of A-Level results. Upon graduation, I have been underway with projects centred around serving this group of youths. While I welcome you to read more about them in my fledgling publication, Entropy : Rhapsody, this specific article serves a more time-sensitive purpose.
The concise goal of this article is two-fold:
(1) To encourage and help university admission hopefuls thoroughly assess whether they should preemptively register for the A-Levels as a repeat candidate for November 2022, even as they await their university admission results.
(2) To offer a helping hand to any post-A-Levels students struggling to navigate the current season, regardless of what they presently believe about their results.
Summary from the Reader’s Perspective:
Perhaps my results did not fall within the Indicative Grade Profile (IGP) of the courses I applied for. Or, I feel the slightest bit uneasy in my gut about a course I only recently decided to settle for — mainly because it accommodates my grade profile.
Perhaps I recently had a change of heart and am now much more determined than before about a particular course of study in higher education. Still, I do not have the prerequisite grades for enrolment.
Regardless, I found myself worried and making decisions primarily based on what I believed to be — what society seems to label, as subpar results. In response to my suffering, it would help if I engaged in some deep work on myself. While doing deep work on myself would be better sooner rather than later, there might be another action I could take first. It will prove to be a balanced and pragmatic way forward while awaiting my admission results: I may be better off registering for the A-Levels this November 2022 before proceeding to thoroughly figure things out with people willing to walk this road with me.
This article invites me, the post-A-Level reader, to a selection of narratives and perspectives which might help me process my present experiences as another crucial post-A-Levels-related deadline — the registration for A-Levels as a private candidate, looms (8 April 2022).
Dear Post-A-Levels reader,
To those of us whose admissions results frankly hang in the balance, perhaps we should register for the A-Levels again, first, even as we continue to figure things out. I offer some perspectives below to facilitate your thought process towards making your own decision on this matter.
A Longer Read
In my work with post-A-Level students over the years, I developed a compassion for the post-A-Level students who felt uncomfortably in between the cracks of teenage society when it came to university applications. There are numerous ways to identify such students, with one such way as having ‘borderline-passed’ their H1 General Paper and three other H2 subjects, but not quite enough to secure a spot in most local public universities’ courses, e.g. BCE/D C. In other words, their results fell outside the Indicative Grade Profile (IGP) ranges provided by the public universities.
I do not find a need to elaborate more on how the A-Level system and its peripheries work, as readers who have made it to this point probably already understand the processes fairly well. I would also presume they both understand and experience the disconcerting and persistent social pressures, expectations, and sentiments surrounding the A-Levels and higher education very well. The latter sentence deserves a long-form article of its own, which would better portray to the general reader why the ‘post-A-Levels struggler’ community deserves just as much love and support at this time of their lives, as the many under-served groups in our society. And why it is worth writing about them and similar groups in future. But this article focuses on the struggling community itself and on extending an immediate offer of practical support for them rather than an analytic treatise.
Be that as it may, to address the faint alternatives to the suggestions that this article is getting at, it suffices for now to state a few things:
Firstly, there are numerous avenues of support for students who ‘do not do well in their A-levels’. These include what the Ministry of Education’s website shows, to the counselling services in one’s Junior College, and even the less inspiring listicles of common sense suggestions lacking any fundamental analysis or personability on your run-of-the-mill education blog. I do not disregard any of these avenues or deem myself better. But I write from lived experiences both as a repeat candidate and a helper of repeat candidates. Herein is the hope to continue addressing, as I have informally done for the past five years, the pains that the above options had not seemed to manage.
For example, imagine Googling’ ‘what do I do with my poor A-Levels results’ only to have ’10 things you can do’-style blogs aggregate unhelpful one-liner advice such as ‘have a go at a Polytechnic course!’ without responsibly explaining much or seeking to understand the reader afterwards. There is no issue here about the Polytechnic route per se; of course ‘Poly’ is a very viable option, and I have even come to know some for whom it was a brilliant option. The issue is with giving general advice to people and nothing more.
Or, it could be that these avenues would indeed have addressed the post-A-Level students’ issues — it is heartening to know that counselling services are available in schools. But it was the students themselves who had avoided those avenues for legitimate reasons of their own. For instance, I have interacted with students who shied away from institutional support because they felt hurt by the institution over the past two years. It would then be senseless to doubly invalidate their hurt and continue to offer them Hobson’s choice.
Secondly, I am neither necessarily encouraging any post-A-Level student to resit their examinations, nor am I ascribing virtues to the act of resitting the A-Levels. Whether resitting is good or bad to do depends. It depends on the post-A-Level student.
There is no general formula to how the late-teen should approach their life, and certainly not in such a way that we might come to the end of this article and say something as ‘it would be better if you got an offer from a university and did not need to resit your A-levels’. I simply do not know any potential reader well enough to write such irresponsibly prescriptive articles.
Sure, we can say that general pieces of advice do exist today and have stood the test of time. However, their prevalence is contingent upon certain dominant mindsets. Take the dominant mindset of ‘practicality’ as an example. The suggestion ‘just get into uni first and settle the rest later’ might therefore be considered good, chop-chop, practical advice (probably to your horror, one year later into university). In essence, general advice (especially nowadays manifested as one-liner advice you get from a social media comments section) works only insofar as we receive it without the thorough process of properly thinking and contextualising a situation for ourselves.
General advice works only when we have not started to think for ourselves and figure out who we are and what we truly want in this season of our lives.
And I hope that all the post-A-Level young adults realise, sooner rather than later, that there was no formulaic or normative approach to our pre-university journey. Or, at least there are no formulaic pathways to the extent that going off-track would irrevocably destroy our futures or lessen our worth and potential along the line. It also becomes all the more silly when we take certain recommendations at face value simply because someone said so. This matter on whose advice to heed is tricky, but a good rule of thumb is knowing that anyone who cares enough about you would probably sit down with you, time and again, and explain their perspective while being completely invested in understanding yours.
Furthermore, I hope the post-A-Level readers consider how it might pay to slow down (especially in a world that is already starting to seem like it is racing further ahead of you). Slow down, and take a deep breath before finding someone willing to figure things out with you.
With you, not for you. These are all going to be your decisions. Your decisions, not done alone, but done together with trusted company, but your decisions nonetheless.
As many post-A-Level students I have worked with before have realised: soon enough, we might even be grateful that we had the opportunity to navigate a crisis much earlier in our lives as compared to our peers.
That being said, deep work takes a long time. And because it takes a long time, many other things can happen in that span of time. We would do well to find a balance between working on ourselves and remaining aware of the developments around us, so as to take actions beneficial to ourselves and to others. Our heightened self-awareness would also help us react more wisely and healthily to our world.
Hence, especially for those of us who at any point in time felt a little bit of hesitation over the ability of our results making a successful university application; or those of us who felt uneasy towards a current application because we were honestly just settling for it with no real motivation, it might be very wise to consider the upcoming important post-A-Level deadline — the private candidate registration.
Consider this deadline to register for the A Levels again regardless of having already made a university application over the last month. Consider this even if we feel nauseated at the thought of retaking the exams. Because, come to the end of it, whether we have eventually registered for the A-Levels again, or taken the exams again, we would have at least emerged more (or less) convicted about our present choices.
And that kind of clarity for ourselves will bring us far.
Should I preemptively register to resit the A-Levels?
I wrote this article firstly intending to capture the group of post-A-Level students who probably already went ahead with applying to university over the last month, but perhaps are still in a precarious position as far as the admissions process is concerned.
(1) To encourage and help university admission hopefuls thoroughly assess whether they should preemptively register for the A-Levels as a repeat candidate for November 2022, even as they await their university admission results.
Picture this scenario that aggregates the lived experiences of multiple students I have interacted with and has occurred more often than I have liked to happen:
As a reader, I might be someone whose results do not exactly fall within the public universities’ published Indicative Grade Profiles (IGPs). There is a decent likelihood that I might come out of this admissions process with no university offer, or at least, offers I am satisfied with. I do not like to think about it. Still, I know that the admissions process for a ‘mainstream’ university such as NUS is more or less heavily reliant on my results. I may have submitted documents under an Aptitude-Based Scheme or made a personal statement at the end of my application. However, it really was a fill-in-the-blanks exercise based on the contents of my Junior College Student Graduate Certificate. Something which everyone has.
Knowing these, I still gunned for something more hopeful as my first choice — a course with IGP 10th-percentile grades at ‘AAB/A’ with my ‘BCD/C’ grades. My second choice’s IGP does not snugly embrace my ‘BBC/C’ either, and my only real shot is with my third choice, which does correspond a little closer to my grades. Ugh. Why are the ‘mainstream’ universities IGPs so inflated nowadays? It seems like my choices are severely limited so long as I do not rack up at least two to three ‘A’s. Anyway, my safe choice being my third choice also poses a problem: I have little control over how many others’ applications make it through in the first and second rounds, and I may end up facing stiff competition in the third round. Should I have just gone ahead with my third choice as the first? Why am I lowkey regretting this strategy now? But I knowingly did so because I am not all that keen on my third choice either. Will I be okay with SUSS? It is a public university too, after all… just one of the newer ones. But something in me tells me it is not good enough, everyone has a politically correct answer and will tell me SUSS or SIT or SIM GE is okay, but I know they will see me as an ‘NUS, NTU or SMU-reject’. I know even I will see myself that way.
I have to go to university. Do I not? I am an A-Level student; how can I not go to university? If I leave the education system now, my certificate is worth less than a Polytechnic Diploma. I do not want to do the A-Levels again, hell no. JC2 was horrible enough, and now doing it again and alone will be far worse. Also, I will be one year behind all my peers — it will be so obvious, and I cannot bring myself to go through that kind of embarrassment. I do know what I want to do… well, there are two things. I want to run a cafe, but will I get belittled for being naïve? At least, I do not need an A-Level certificate to explore a future in small business ownership. But would doing so be a waste, since I have already spent all this time on my A-Levels? The second thing I recently realised I wish to study, was Linguistics. It’s my first choice but with this year’s IGP being a good five steps of grades away from mine, I know my scores are likely not going to get me in… Should I just settle for that third choice, if I even get that third choice at all?
Dear reader, the scenario written above is no anomalous encounter. It represents students who fall in the 50s to mid-60s range of rank points for A-Level results. And these scarcely scratch the surface of their experience; the above can be a simple paroxysm of fearful thoughts that come and go within the short span of 1-and-a-half minutes. It is a devastating way to wait out their days between university applications and admissions. Yet, it is just as devastating to numb themselves from it all and let the three months of waiting fly by.
In the above scenario, we find societal pressures and narratives that have both besieged and shaped the post-A-Level students’ expectations of themselves. As the admissions offers roll out between March to late June, they know that deep down, they are really holding out hope for an acceptance into a course they are reaching for, as far as the first and second choices are concerned. There has often been something human about preferring to rely on the luck of the draw and therefore making riskier first and second choice applications. Unfortunately, these students who should have less room for risk land themselves in a more dangerous position of coming out in July with no admission offers made to them at all.
At this juncture, essential but simple management of risk comes into play.
According to the Singapore Examinations and Assessment Board (SEAB), this window for private candidate registration has just opened and will stay open for only 11 days and close non-negotiably on 8 April 2022.
If we come to July and find ourselves with no admission offers but had preemptively registered for the A-Levels, we know that we have at least one more option to reconsider alongside others, such as private institutions.
If we come to July and find ourselves with no admission offers but had preemptively registered for the A-Levels, we know that we have at least one more option to reconsider alongside others, such as private institutions.
Of course, the A-Levels also costs money to register. It runs into the hundreds of dollars for a complete set of 3H2/1H1 + GP exams. However, this is where the risk (of paying ~ SGD 600) can instead be seen as a premium paid to purchase an option — to be made available to us come July. The question becomes, “am I willing to pay ~ SGD 600 to allow myself the option to resit the exam in Nov this year, were I to end up with no university admission offer?”
Moreover, we could put that ~ SGD 600 premium into a cost perspective and see how other factors offset such a present cost in the future:
Firstly, The SEAB provides a charitable clause in section 3.3.2, which states that you get a full refund if you gain admission to a tertiary institution and matriculate into that university. Secondly, there are other factors such as the opportunity cost of your future tuition fees, were you to enrol in a course you otherwise had little interest in. University fees are not cheap compared to the ~ SGD 600. Project the university fees four years down, and they run into the tens of thousands of dollars. This time possibly with bank loans and debt involved. Not to mention a lot of time during your most formative years of young adulthood.
I have therefore heard too many stories of students lamenting their choice to enrol in a course based on limited options and scarce motivation. Many would turn back time and have much rathered thought harder and longer about their subsequent decisions. They would have paid greater attention to whether they already had a strong starting interest or sense of commitment, before enrolling in a corresponding university faculty. Or not do it at all. They would have taken it slow to figure things out, even if it meant spending an extra year resitting the exams. Or, they would have just not rashly dove into a 4-year university course for its sake. Finally, they might have pursued unconventional pathways that they only realised two to three years later were not all that unconventional after all. This phenomenon above, which can manifest in varied ways, is highly deleterious and deserves an article of its own, which I will write in due course.
Therefore, the premium of ~ SGD 600 does not look so daunting or painful when considering the context of several alternatives. Suppose such a sum still proves too challenging to eke out. In that case, I have faith that there are ways to overcome such pecuniary challenges in the spirit of accessibility to education. I would invite the reader to have a chat with me.
If anything, I also wish to generate some noise over this scarcely publicised deadline (8 April) and the key terms and conditions laid out by the SEAB — especially the refund clause. Unfortunately, yet understandably in a season of pain, many do not deign to pore through the terms.
The A-Level private candidate registration period ends on 8 April 2022. I, along with several friends, am offering support and advising for post-A-Level students who continue to feel shaken by their A-Level results and are contemplating re-sitting the exams in Nov 2022/23/24.
This brings me to my second objective in writing this article:
(2) To offer a helping hand to any post-A-Level students struggling to navigate the current season, regardless of what they presently believe about their results.
Exploring what it means to do well
Earlier in the article, I used quotation marks in “students who ‘do not do well for their A-Levels’” to highlight the assumption behind ‘doing well’.
What even does ‘to do well’ imply?
That is an essential question for any student to ask themselves. We should ask the question routinely; with a healthy dose of self-reflection. At the same time, we should offer a measure of respect and acceptance for the way others around us have decided for themselves what ‘doing well’ by them means. Because if we are post-A-Level students reading up to this point, we might have already begun to wonder about something we have probably asked ourselves and of others a lot in the past two months.
“How bad/good are my results?” “When the writer offered his help above, would he help someone with a CCC/B, an ABC/D, or only the EEE/Ds?”
I agree that there is a hint of objectivity to the goodness and badness of one’s A-Level results, as with other examination results across formal education systems. A candidate may determine the objective merit of their results by the number of post-results options available to them. Or, perhaps the candidate sits amongst the top fifty or top two per cent of scores within the cohort.
But there also comes a time when the objectivity of results needs to stop taking centre stage and a mature form of subjectivity takes over.
To that effect, when someone comes along with a sincere plea for help, I have often found it harmful to pass remarks as callously as,
‘your results are good; what are you talking about?’.
When working with the post-A Level hurt and lost, it paid to err on the side of caution while genuinely attempting to meet the person where they were. Besides, with some experience, it would become easier to sniff a humble bragger from miles away. One would also develop a tactfulness not to gaslight someone’s experience; a tactfulness not to pass general statements based on surface assessments and simplistic objective observations.
I have encountered die-hard law school hopefuls who felt devastated with a BBB/B, and aspiring med school candidates who had perfect scores but quivered at the barrenness of their extracurriculars page. It might be easy to roll my eyes and say that these people were fine, but were they really in the larger scheme of things? Were they really, if setbacks like those were enough to send their adolescent minds into a frenzy?
Suppose I am also in the business of facilitating youths into self-loving and resilient versions of themselves; youths who had objectively excellent scores but broken dreams nevertheless. Such youths would therefore also do well by exploring the narratives that had come to form strongholds in their lives (e.g. “I must, must, MUST be a doctor”). These students are no less perfect candidates for a deep conversation. They are even sparkling examples to potential repeat candidates as to why a perfect set of grades may not solve their problems down the road. One simply does not resit an exam to get better results as the be all and end all.
Conversely, our inadvertent over-reliance on objective assessments of grades might create confusing situations that I have seen in some families: relatives who take it upon themselves to ‘encourage’ a student to aim higher when said student really only wanted to enter nursing school which had an IGP cutoff of CCC/C, and throughout Junior College simply aimed for an average score of Cs. Why, this student has done subjectively well along with a clear and healthy goal in mind. Who is anyone to bulldoze in and scorn the string of Cs?
Therefore, it is perhaps wise to meet all of these youths where they are while suspending our judgments for a little while. The reader may have a CCC/D or an AAB/B — I do not really care. If you are hurting and find your thoughts racing down the rabbit hole, you deserve the right to ask for help. The pain and suffering are not intrinsic to those letter grades; they stem from elsewhere, and the letter grades are but triggers of something more deeply embedded within. ‘Doing well’ can be objective, but it is more helpful to see the subjective and contextual side if we wish to build up people who thrive together and not just survive on their own.
Only when I have a deluge of students does the barometer of objective standards come into play to help with resource allocation. But an objective standard should never be the sole standard upon which we triage our youths.
So, if the reader happens to be a post-A-Level student who objectively did alright with a BBB/B but contextually just really wants to read medicine in university, a conversation would do just as well to survey what might have happened, what could happen (perhaps gunning for the postgraduate degree with Duke-NUS?), and more importantly, why all this pain is happening in the first place. If it comes to pass that registering for the exams again by 8 April was the path to take, then godspeed; it may just be the reader’s best year yet. And if, instead, there is newfound peace about taking another pathway without feeling aggrieved or labelling themselves med school rejects, how sweet that peace must be.
Whatever our results, I hope we recognise how essential it is to navigate our way forward from our A-Level results in a healthy manner. Recognise that this process takes deep work, a long time, and can be unique to each person’s lived experience, but valid across them all the same.
More about the writer
I believe that by this juncture, many readers have begun to beg the question, “who even is this writer?” In short, I was once a repeat candidate myself, and have been in private candidate-facing programmes and communities and learned from first hand experiences how to approach this journey healthily. The post-A-Level strugglers in the manner described throughout this article have long been a disorganised community. Disorganised but understandably so, given how any one’s situation is scarcely similar to another’s. During my undergraduate days in Yale-NUS College, I continued on my own time to support numerous post-A-Level graduates and A-Level students who struggled in such circumstances. I also continued to learn and practice ways of serving different communities in both academic and student life settings. For instance, I picked up theoretical skill sets as a Fellow of the Chua Thian Poh Community Leadership Centre, and had hands-on training and service experience as a Residential College Advisor to first-years in Yale-NUS College. All these and more have left me at the point of graduation wanting to serve this post-A-Level community better. Interested readers may read a more introductory piece detailing my motivation to spend more time in this space.
How I hope to help
Come and have a chat with my friends and me. Let us dig a little deeper into your situation and figure things out together piece by piece. You may come to the 8th of April not needing to register for the exams again, or otherwise. Neither of those is my goal. Instead, I deem a successful conversation and encounter as one where we become more cognizant of our options and experience greater ownership, self-awareness, and peace about what we eventually choose to do on the road ahead.
Just imagine what a conversation that could prove to be. (“: .
In Conclusion
I hope this article reaches the post-A-Level youths who just want someone to talk things through. So much more can be done but firstly with the start of a conversation.
Dear friend, if you are reading this and oscillate between feeling this article speaks to you and that you might not be the right target audience, or even that ‘other worse-off people probably deserve this more than I do and I do not wish to be a hogger,’ I encourage you to simply gauge your experience with this: if even for a second while reading this article, you felt you might get something out from a follow-up conversation that would ease your suffering, drop me a message.
At the end of the day, I, along with the help I engage to serve you, do not claim to be gurus or sages with instructions to prescribe. I do not offer off-the-shelf advice that discounts the reverent ‘it depends’ condition which we could only achieve in subsequent conversations. I also do not wish to debate better approaches and criticisms of my article and aggregated experiences with an impersonal audience online. My focus is you, post-A-Level reader. And if what you are experiencing is very real to you, so also should I honour you with real conversation by getting to know you. That may just be the little I can offer you as a fellow sojourner who once shared in your suffering.
So let’s have a conversation and make it as safe a space as possible
I apologise that I am not keen on giving out my mobile number, as much as that is the most convenient option. Please do not feel shy to contact me via these channels, and I will see to it as swiftly as I can:
Facebook Message: facebook.com/marcus.chua.18
Instagram: @marcushonwei
Email: (Use Subject: “Post A-Level: [Your Name]”) marcus.chua.hw@gmail.com
Telegram: @marcushonwei
Please do not feel hindered by the message that starts us off! A simple ‘Hi, I read your article and hope we could have a chat’ is more than splendid.
Afterwards, I might invite you, possibly along with several others who similarly sought help, as time is short, to a public but conducive space in a central location (drinks on me). We’ll then work through each other’s situations and questions together. Or we may Zoom if we have to.
Nevertheless, I understand how this may seem daunting, and some of us feel too vulnerable for something like the above. It is okay. Never mind if you prefer having a chat individually, so once again — drop me a message! But, as a caveat, I am afraid it will be difficult for me to commit to a conversation should you eventually wish to continue doing so in such a way as to maintain complete anonymity. I say so because I need to know how to best allocate my time and resources to those I am confident need it. In other words, at some point, I will minimally have to know you are indeed who you say you are: a struggling post-A-Level student.
There did not seem to be the best place to say this, but do not worry, if you did: the conversations are free of charge.
Thank you for taking the time to read this message. I thought to get this one out at my soonest amidst all my work, but do stay tuned to my Entropy : Rhapsody page, where I juggle between racing to convert my piles of drafts and ensuring every article was meaningfully edited to the point of being impactful enough to help at least one single reader find their footing forward by just a bit more.
I hope this encounter has been serendipitous for you.
You are more than your results.
Marcus
