Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday defended the city’s single-textbook policy ahead of high school joint entrance exams with New Taipei City (新北市) and Keelung amid concerns about whether the policy will help reduce exam pressure on students.
Standardizing middle school textbooks was one of Hau’s major campaign promises, along with attracting more students to Taipei City junior high schools through a joint exam.
The first high school joint exam is scheduled for May 21 and May 22, the same days as the national joint high school entrance exam.
Hau said all the questions on the exams organized by Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung would be drawn from the single-version textbooks adopted by the three cities.
“We want to assure students that they will be able to handle the test by reading the textbooks we assigned, and they no longer need to attend cram schools or read other reference books to score well on the exam,” Hau said at Taipei City Hall.
When asked why cram schools in the city are continuing to thrive despite the implementation of the joint textbook policy, Hau said the city government would try to instill confidence in the standarized book policy among students and their parents through the joint exam.
“Students and parents will know that all exam questions are from the required textbooks so they don’t need to rely on cram schools to prepare,” he said.
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:
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