A group of parents yesterday demonstrated outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, calling on presidential and legislative candidates to take a stance on the call to abolish the much-maligned high-school admission system and restoring the Basic Competence Test.
The year-old admission system is problematic and unfair, as students’ non-academic talents and skills can be taken into account — for example the ability to play a musical instrument or an athletic skill or physical fitness level — when a school whose recruitment level is nearing capacity must decide between students who achieved the same entrance exam score.
This rule places students from average and low-income families at a disadvantage because their families might not have the resources to finance extracurricular classes or sports activities.
A New Taipei City teacher surnamed Lee (李) said that after the system took effect last year, students who won awards in musical competitions or received good physical fitness grades were given extra points when applying to high schools.
Due to the shortage of licensed accreditation institutes, some parents drove their children across the nation just so they could get a certification, Lee said, adding that physical fitness certificates were often issued “superfluously.”
The system panders to wealthy families who are able to pay for expensive classes and teachers so that their children can learn to play an instrument or develop a talent, Lee said.
She also criticized the rules for students prioritizing the schools they would like to attend.
Students are asked to select groups of five schools and rank them according to their chances of being admitted; if a student fails to be admitted by any schools in a group, they are then demoted to the next group on their list, where they are judged against students with lower test scores, and one point is deducted from their own score, Lee said, adding that the whole process hurts a student’s chances of admission.
The Ministry of Education’s frequent changes to the rules has left parents panicking, she said, which meant they ended up bombarding teachers with queries when high-school entrance exam came around, she said.
Teachers end up acting like “fortune tellers” to students asking their advice on school prioritization, Lee said.
Although the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has promised to waive the entrance exam as part of its efforts to improve the 12-year national education system, many parents want the Basic Competence Test restored because they think is the fairest recruiting tool.
Lee urged DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to attend forums with teachers and parents to discuss education issues.
National Parents’ Alliance for 12-year Compulsory Education vice president Chen Chi-chen (陳綺貞) said she faxed surveys and made telephone calls to the campaign offices of legislative candidates nationwide last week, asking whether the candidate would back the appeals for change.
Only 13 candidates said they would, she said.
The low response rate had left her feeling disheartened, because it was far behind the response of Taipei city councilor candidates ahead of the nine-in-one elections in November last year.
Of the 37 Taipei city councilor candidates who responded to the survey, 34 were elected, Chen said.
She said legislative candidates should not to take education issues lightly, and promised to make another round of calls to campaign offices this week.
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater