More top A-level students pick NTU

SINGAPORE - More top students in Singapore are choosing Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as their first choice.

The proportion of those in the top 15 per cent of the A-level cohort entering NTU has risen by 83 per cent this year from that in 2011, said its president, Professor Bertil Andersson, at the opening ceremony of its annual convocation yesterday.

This has resulted from NTU becoming more well-known internationally, after faring better in global university rankings, he said.

For instance, in a ranking published by London-based education and career consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds in September last year, NTU rose to the 41st position, up from 47th in 2012.

In another ranking, published by London-based magazine Times Higher Education last October, NTU improved by 10 spots to reach the 76th position.

A resurgence of interest in engineering - NTU's biggest discipline - may have helped too.

For the class of 2014, two in three students have found jobs before they graduated. About 4,300 have gone on internships or industrial attachments to about 1,500 companies. Each year, three in 10 students are offered jobs by the firms they were attached to.

NTU's senior associate provost of undergraduate education, Professor Kam Chan Hin, said NTU students are now more work-ready than before.

"When we revamped our curriculum in 2011... what we believed in is a holistic education," he said. "When you start working, there are so many courses involved. How you interact with people, how you work as a team... All these things are very important."

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