The Taipei City Government will soon launch an exam-free senior high school entrance program for junior high students as part of efforts to implement a 12-year compulsory education system.
The “Northern Star” program, which will be implemented next year, will offer 1,028 junior high school students the opportunity to enter high school and vocational schools solely on their academic performance, the Department of Education said yesterday.
Graduating junior high school students whose average grades are in the top 40 percent in their schools will be eligible to join the program.
Each of the city’s junior high schools will be invited to recommend 10 students to high schools within the city.
Senior high schools will then have to accept up to two students for each class.
No details were available on the criteria that high schools would use to select the students.
About 2.7 percent of Taipei City’s junior high school students will be able to enter high schools through the program, the department said.
Wu Ching-shan (吳清山), commissioner of the department, said the program would prevent high schools from accepting more than two students from the same junior high school and provide more opportunities for students at less competitive schools to enter senior high schools and vocational schools.
The city’s more prestigious senior high schools, such as Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School and Taipei First Girls High School, will be included in the program.
The department said it expected the program to increase the overall quality of senior high and vocational schools and promote the 12-year compulsory education system.
The government intends to abolish entrance exams for 90 percent of junior high graduates when entering senior high schools by 2018.
Under the program, entrance exams would be taken by 10 percent of junior high students willing to take the tests to gain admission to elite high schools.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching