World Scholar’s Cup Global Round Kuala Lumpur

In mid-June, eight of our A-Level students competed in the World Scholar’s Cup Global Round which was held in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center and 8 other host schools, including Sunway itself. This tournament was officially introduced to Sunway by A-Level students Miyuki Goay and Darren Tan, who recently founded the Sunway Scholars Club, where they coached dozens of students from all programs.

The World Scholar’s Cup (WSC) is the world’s biggest academic decathlon and consists of four events – Team Debate, Scholar’s Challenge, Collaborative Writing and Scholar’s Bowl. 4500 scholars from more than 60 different countries gathered in Kuala Lumpur to debate each other and ruminate on neurology and the history of diplomacy through their philosophical essays. Why is K-pop South Korea’s biggest source of diplomatic power? How did Dogecoin invent cryptocurrency crowdfunding? Why do we forget things when we walk into another room? The answers to these questions are but one of thousands posed to 20,000 scholars around the world in this year’s annual theme – An Entangled World. The World Scholar’s Cup encourages collaborative learning over the stressful competitive environments we find in classrooms today, and this is part of the reason students from all over the world keep coming back for more. It fosters an unquenchable thirst and unbridled passion for learning – for the sake of learning itself.

Sunway was among the top 3 schools in the world at this year’s Global Round, beating out household names like Hwa Chong, Nanyang Girls High School, Tsinghua University High School, University of Toronto School, and Hong Kong’s King George V School. Two of our teams placed 11^th and 14^th in the world, while Miyuki Goay ranked 13^th individual scholar out of thousands of scholars. Darren Tan, an A-Level student himself and coach for the Sunway delegation, was awarded the inaugural Global Round Asimov Award for placing 1^st in the Scholar’s Challenge and ranking as the top scholar in Southeast Asia. Darren also did Sunway and Malaysia proud by being elected to be the country’s flagbearer at the closing ceremony in KLCC, attended by diplomats and members of the royal family.

All Sunway students qualified to compete at Yale University in the prestigious final round known as the Tournament of Champions. Three of them from the A-Level program – William Low, Nicholas Loh and Miyuki Goay – will be travelling to New York City and New Haven in the United States in November. Having left the World Scholar’s Cup as one of the most famed and decorated scholars ever, Darren is likely going to be there as well – he is now part of the globe-trotting WSC organizing committee.

Here in Sunway, the Sunway Scholars Club is gearing up for another big event after helping Sunway Education Group secure the Global Round hosting, which saw more than 700 scholars from 50 countries descend on our campus. They are organizing another similar tournament to encourage WSC-style learning amongst the Sunway student community as well as help Malaysian scholars prepare for the upcoming Yale Tournament of Champions. We wish them all the best in this endeavor and for their trip to the US to engender resounding success!