Councilors lock horns over exams

With the Ministry of Education (教育部) seemingly poised to replace the senior high school entrance examination with a diversified enrollment system starting this semester, a war of words was ignited yesterday within the Taipei City Government.

Hostilities erupted when a city councilor proposed postponing the new scheme for another year.

"I'm calling for a stop to this undeveloped scheme because I really hate to see our students become the laboratory mice for an outlandish experiment," said New Party City Councilor Chung Hsiao-ping (鍾小平).

The education ministry spearheaded moves in 1998 to scrap the 42-year-old joint senior high school entrance examination as part of its educational reform efforts.

On June 30 this year, the new government announced a simplified version of the originally proposed six-channel admission scheme.

The new initiative

Under the new initiative, three major channels will be available for students to enter senior high schools.

Students would be admitted based on an application (申請入學), a school recommendation (甄試入學) and allocation based on grades on the Basic Competency Tests (BCT, 登記分發).

BCTs will be held twice a year and students will pick their best grades to use in applications. The first test is scheduled to take place on March 31 and April 1 next year, and the second on June 9 and 10.

The principal distinction between the new three-channel scheme and the abolished six-channel one is that school grades will not be considered, and that BCT grades will be the only criteria used to evaluate students' academic ability.

In a bid to tackle the possibility that schools may have to choose among students gaining the same BCT score, the city's Bureau of Education (BOE,教育局) last Thursday proposed that schools might consider holding a second-stage academic ability test, in which subjects requiring little memorization -- such as composition, listening comprehension, and scientific experiments -- are tested.

Bureau's proposal comes under fire

The bureau's proposal received immediate criticism from legislator and spokeswoman for the PFP caucus, Diane Lee (李慶安).

She called on the education ministry last Friday to stop the city's "inappropriate behavior," claiming that the test would do nothing but add to the pressure on students.

Lee's view was echoed by Vice Minister of Education Fan Sun-lu (范巽綠), who said yesterday that the bureau's proposal was "not education, but another way of screening elite students for the `star schools.'"

In response, four female KMT city councilors -- Chen Hsueh-fen (陳雪芬), Lin Yi-hua (林亦華), Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) and Chen Li-hui (陳孋輝) -- yesterday asked Fan, who is a DPP member, to stop "misleading the public with lies" and "retaliating against the KMT-led city government for political reasons."

They also threatened that the council's Education Examination Committee (教審會) may ask that the BOE not attend any of the education ministry's reform meetings in the future.

Their words, however, immediately backfired when four DPP city councilors -- Ko Chin-sheng (柯景昇), Lee Chien-chang (李建昌), Tsai Chiu-huang (蔡秋凰), and Yeh Hin-yi (葉信義) -- held a press conference.

Speaking as the convener of the Education Examination Committee, Lee Chien-chang rejected the four KMT councilors' statements.

"I've never made such remarks," Lee said. "I hope that everyone calms down a little bit and handles the matter reasonably."