A coalition of education groups yesterday rallied in front of Taipei City Hall to protest against the high-school admission system under the 12-year national education system, with protesters making three appeals to education officials in Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung.
Under the current system, students are required to select groups of five schools based on their high-school admission exam results and rank the groups according to how good their chances of admission are.
The protesters called on officials to increase the number of schools students must select for each group from five to 10.
Photo: CNA
This would lower the chances of students being assigned to schools that do not match up to their high-school entrance examination scores, they said.
They called for the abolition of a grading system that deducts one point from students’ test scores whenever they fail to be admitted to any school in a group and are demoted to the next group on their lists.
They said that the education authorities of the three municipalities should require public high schools to fill remaining vacancies by implementing a follow-up admission process, so that students could still be admitted to these schools, instead of vocational high schools or expensive private schools, if they initially fail to be admitted to their preferred institutes.
Alliance on Obligatory Education director-general Wang Li-sheng (王立昇) said that allowing students to choose five schools in a group might be sufficient for students who receive mostly “A’s” on test subjects, but that it amounts to a “gamble” to most students who do not test so well, as uncertainties increase when students are required to choose from a large group of average schools.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Lee Hsin (李新), who attended the rally to support the protesters, said the rule that deducts one point from students’ overall test scores often causes students to end up at schools that are far inferior to those that they could have been assigned to.
The system has produced an “unreasonable” outcome where public high schools in the three municipalities recorded 2,067 vacancies after the results of this year’s high-school entrance examination were announced, Lee said.
“Most students want to be admitted to public schools, because they are better financed by the government, but many students were forced to settle with less ideal outcomes,” he said. “The vacancies have seriously affected 2,067 families.”
National Parents’ Alliance for 12-year Compulsory Education vice president Chen Chi-chen (陳綺貞) said that schools with vacancies are to cut the number of classes in the upcoming semester, even though they receive the same amount of subsidies paid with taxpayers’ money.
Wang said that education authorities at local government levels can decide whether to implement the rule that deducts one point from students’ test scores if they are not admitted to any schools in a group.
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