Thrive by The Business Times asked me whether a graduate today could afford the commitments I made in my twenties. The honest answer is no — and the reason is the same piece of arithmetic I teach every week. Featured in: Thrive by The Business Times · View the feature In my twenties I owned a car and a private …
Top 10 Qualities of Successful Economics Students
Every year I teach students from the most selective JCs who finish with a C, and students from schools with far lower cut-off points who finish with an A. After 26 years of teaching Economics, this has stopped surprising me. Economics is not a subject where being quick gets you very far. It rewards students who understand mechanisms well enough …
The Economic Logic Behind Singapore’s Education “Arms Race”
My commentary in Lianhe Zaobao (联合早报), 12 August 2026 By Kelvin Hong (方健文), Founder and Principal Tutor, The Economics Tutor I run a tuition centre. Economically, I have every reason to want Singapore’s education system to stay exactly as competitive as it is. That is the uncomfortable position I wrote from last week in Lianhe Zaobao, in a commentary titled …
H2 Economics Exam Trends 2021–2025: Why Application, Not Memorisation, Now Decides Your Grade
If you are preparing for H2 Economics, the single most useful thing you can know about the recent papers is this: the examiners have been steadily moving away from questions you can answer from lecture notes alone. Reviewing the last five years of papers, a clear pattern emerges. Questions increasingly ask you to apply familiar theory in unfamiliar contexts, or …
Featured on Money FM 89.3: Why Young Singaporeans Are Earning More But Feeling Poorer
Despite starting salaries jumping by 35% to 40% over the last decade, there is widespread anxiety among young adults in Singapore that they are financially falling behind. Our Principal Tutor, Kelvin Hong, was recently interviewed on Money FM 89.3 with Hongbin Jeong to break down the real-world economics of inflation, housing, and the true cost of living. If you have …
Top 5 H2 Economics Tuition in Singapore for 2026
The single most important fact about H2 Economics, and the one that most JC students take too long to internalise, is that the 9570 syllabus is not primarily testing what they know. Under the current SEAB 9570 syllabus, H2 Economics weighs all four Assessment Objectives: knowledge, application, analysis, and evaluation equally across Paper 1 (case study) and Paper 2 (essays). …
JC vs Poly vs IB Economics in Singapore: Which Pathway Should You Choose?
In Singapore, you can study Economics through three main pathways: Junior College (the GCE A-Level), Polytechnic, or the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma. JC Economics is the most theoretical and exam-based, Poly Economics is the most practical and industry-focused, and IB Economics balances the two with a global perspective. So the right choice depends far less on which is “best” and …
How to Score an A for JC Economics (A-Level) in Singapore (2026 Guide)
Most Singapore students who struggle with JC Economics are not struggling because they didn’t study enough. They studied and did everything, like highlighting lecture notes, memorising definitions, collecting model essays, and re-reading the textbook the weekend before the prelim. Then the script came back with a C, a D, or worse. The problem was not that the students didn’t study …
Why Starting IB Economics Tuition Early Is No Longer Optional – It’s Essential
The International Baccalaureate Economics course has undergone a quiet revolution. The demands of the modern syllabus, a relentless climb in exam difficulty, and a workload that now outstrips most A-Level specifications—more syllabus topics, three exam papers instead of two, and three additional internally assessed commentaries—have completely changed the game. Students who wait until Year 2 to seek support almost always …
What Premium H2 Economics Tuition Should Actually Look Like
Let’s be brutally honest: if your H2 Economics tuition consists of sitting in a chair, listening to a tutor read off PowerPoint slides, and furiously copying down notes, you are wasting your time and money. You can get that for free from a textbook. H2 Economics is a completely different beast from secondary school subjects. The A-Level examiners do not …