Taipei will be allowed to implement its controversial high-school admissions plan this year, Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) said yesterday.
“Taipei’s plan is not consistent with our original consensus, but for the sake of protecting the rights and interests of all students, the K-12 Education Administration will provide substantial necessary assistance,” he said.
He added that the controversial statistical tool at the heart of Taipei’s plan would not be available for use starting from next year.
“Starting in the 2016 school year, ‘rulers’ [量尺] will no longer be provided to calculate scores,” Wu said. “Every county and city will have to find other ways of ranking students when the number of students applying to a school exceeds the number of available spaces.”
Following the deletion of “rulers,” new ranking procedures would be introduced next year in consultation with the local education department, he said, adding that the ministry continues to encourage localities to use “special examinations” (特招) to sort gifted students.
Rulers are the most precise of several statistical tools used to translate scores on the Comprehensive Assessment Program battery of tests into the ranking system used to place students. Under ministry reforms to make secondary education compulsory, the importance of test scores in admissions was deliberately watered down by using statistical tools to reduce their precision, increasing the importance of other ranking measures.
Wu’s announcement follows months of controversy over use of the tool in the high-school admissions plan adopted by the combined Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung school district.
While the ministry has condemned Taipei’s omission of other ranking measures to increase the importance of rulers, saying it violates the spirit of its educational reforms, Taipei has maintained that its usage of the tool is necessary to guarantee fairness and within the prerogative of local self-government.
K-12 Education Administration Director Wu Ching-shan (吳清山) said the ministry would provide the statistical information necessary for Taipei to use rulers in its high-school admissions program this year.
Even though scores calculated using the tool would not be shown on report cards issued nationally, Taipei “in principle” would be allowed to provide the information to students itself, he said, adding that details are still under discussion.
“If the Ministry of Education feels that rulers are unsuitable or are being used in a way that goes against their original purpose, they can decide whether or not to remove them,” Taipei Department of Education Commissioner Tang Chih-min (湯志民) said, adding that his department would draft future high-school admissions policies within the framework provided by the ministry.
He added that this year Taipei intends to allow students to look up their ruler scores online with other grades.
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