The Ministry of Education yesterday said it would reject Taipei, New Taipei City and Keeling’s joint draft plan for amending the ranking system used when applicants exceed a school’s enrollment quota.
Under the K-12 compulsory education program implemented this year, in cases where applicants exceed a school’s enrollment quota, places are awarded according to a complicated series of rankings which take into account students’ learning performance across various fields, levels scored on the Comprehensive Assessment Program and how high students place a school on their list of preferences.
Students are initially ranked according to a comprehensive score in which all three elements are worth 30 points. In cases where students’ comprehensive scores are tied, they are then subjected to a series of re-rankings which compare different elements of the comprehensive score until the tie is broken.
In addition to directly comparing students’ school preference lists and performances across various fields, levels scored on the Comprehensive Assessment Program are broken down and directly compared according to ever finer levels which more closely match the students’ exact scores.
The ordering of the rankings students within the three cities’ are subjected to has been changed in the proposal by the local governments. The changes would increase the relative importance of the Comprehensive Assessment Program by moving up measures based on students’ scores in the exam.
Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) said the ministry rejected the proposal because it violated legal requirements that finer levels of comparison based on the Comprehensive Assessment Program only be used as a last resort when all other measures of comparison had been exhausted.
Taipei’s Department of Education said such measures were necessary to ensure fairness in highly competitive school districts.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods