Legislators yesterday questioned the effectiveness of a program intended to help college admissions for senior high school students affected by the 921 earthquake, after some students were rejected despite their excellent performances on entrance exams.
KMT legislators Lin Yaw-shing (林耀興) and the DPP's Tsai Huang-lang (蔡煌瑯) said they have received complaints from about a dozen parents.
"Even when the performance of these students is even better than average candidates, they have to endure the cruelty of being rejected," Lin said. "Apparently, this package is inadequately designed."
After the earthquake, some universities decided to make available additional openings for students from the hard-hit areas of central Taiwan. The openings, however, were restricted to only two admission categories.
In the recommendation category, 458 departments from 43 universities offered a total of 841 extra openings for the so-called "921 students," in addition to the 9,374 openings originally planned for the recommendation category.
Fourteen affected senior high schools recommended 1,055 students to vie for the 841 openings. Only 552 of them obtained admission, according to statistics from the College Entrance Examination Center (大學入學考試中心). Lin and Tsai said since each department usually had only one or two extra openings, some students weren't admitted even if they scored higher than other students on entrance tests.
For example, the Providence University's Department of Youth and Child Welfare had five recommendation openings for normal students, but only one for the earthquake-affected students.
Lu Chung-ming (呂崇銘), a parent from Nantou County, whose child sought to enter the department, said that his child was rejected even though he had scored 82 on tests held by the department. Meanwhile, the fifth candidate in the average group was admitted having scored just 79.
Under the recommendation category, a department will review students' school records in addition to their schools' recommendation. While some departments may require the results of their academic competency test to qualify, others may hold individual entrance tests for candidates.
In the case above, though normal students and earthquake-affected students both took the same entrance tests, their qualifications were reviewed separately.
To make up for the defects, Lin and Tsai suggested that the Ministry of Education try to coordinate with the universities concerned so that 921 students who had performed better or as well as average students could all gain admission.
Huang Pi-twan (
"We hope to coordinate with the universities to work out some corrective measures, such as increasing the quotas," Huang said. "The universities didn't expect there would be so many excellent students."
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