Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) yesterday instructed the Ministry of Education (MOE) to propose a plan within a month to improve high school education after the results of this year’s college admissions showed students with negligible scores on the entrance exams were accepted.
Cabinet Spokeswoman Vanessa Shih (史亞平) said the premier was dismayed to see the lowest college entrance score among those accepted to university was 7.69 points. The maximum score for students applying to major in the humanities was 500 and in the sciences it was 600.
“What we are concerned about was not the score itself but why our high school graduates would score only this high,” Shih told a press conference after the Cabinet’s weekly meeting yesterday.
“This highlights a problem with quality management in higher, secondary and vocational education,” she said. “The premier believes schools should have a mechanism to manage the quality [of their graduates].”
This year’s college admissions were finalized last Friday, with the acceptance rate hitting a new high of 97.1 percent. The lowest entrance score of someone admitted to university was 7.69 points, at Leader University’s department of health and environment in Tainan.
“The premier emphasized that human resources are the nation’s only competitive resource. Poor management of the quality of our human resources could seriously damage our national competitiveness,” she said.
Meanwhile, the ministry is mulling whether to allow high schools to hold back students with unsatisfactory grades in key subjects.
High school students are required to repeat a grade if they fail more than 50 percent of the credits they take during one school year. If they fail key subjects such as math or English but meet the overall requirements they are not held back. Any student who completes 160 credits over the course of high school is allowed to graduate regardless of their performance in specific subjects.
“There are indeed some blind spots” in the rules, Department of Secondary Education Director Su Teh-hsiang (蘇德祥) said.
“Some students can still graduate and take part in the college entrance exams after completing their credits even though they perform poorly on academic subjects. We may need to adjust part of the regulations,” Su said.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
The eastern extension of the Taipei MRT Red Line could begin operations as early as late June, the Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems said yesterday. Taipei Rapid Transit Corp said it is considering offering one month of free rides on the new section to mark its opening. Construction progress on the 1.4km extension, which is to run from the current terminal Xiangshan Station to a new eastern terminal, Guangci/Fengtian Temple Station, was 90.6 percent complete by the end of last month, the department said in a report to the Taipei City Council's Transportation Committee. While construction began in October 2016 with an
NON-RED SUPPLY: Boosting the nation’s drone industry is becoming increasingly urgent as China’s UAV dominance could become an issue in a crisis, an analyst said Taiwan’s drone exports to Europe grew 41.7-fold from 2024 to last year, with demand from Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression the most likely driver of growth, a study showed. The Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) in a statement on Wednesday said it found that many of Taiwan’s uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) sales were from Poland and the Czech Republic. These countries likely transferred the drones to Ukraine to aid it in its fight against the Russian invasion that started in 2022, it said. Despite the gains, Taiwan is not the dominant drone exporter to these markets, ranking second and fourth
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
RSS