The nation’s extended “two-track” college admissions system keeps students from focusing on their final year of high school, while making it difficult for teachers to design appropriate coursework, protesters said at a rally outside the Ministry of Education in Taipei yesterday.
“Even letting universities independently enroll students would be a better option than continuing to implement a half-baked version of the European and US admissions systems without resolving the incompleteness of students’ high-school education,” Alliance on Obligatory Education director-general Wang Li-sheng (王立昇) said.
High-school students take a broad General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) over the winter break during their final year, before going through an application process that is completed in May. Students also have the option of taking a narrower Assigned Subject Test after they graduate, with admissions tied directly to scores.
The application process was introduced several years ago in an attempt to reduce the relative importance of standardized testing during admissions, with the percentage of students admitted by taking the Assigned Subject Test gradually declining to about a third this year.
Wang said the system has failed to live up to promises that earlier testing would free high-school students to pursue elective coursework.
“Our hope was that high-school students who make rapid progress would be able to take college-level coursework, but instead what has happened is that colleges have had to begin offering a remedial bridge course, wasting resources and time,” Wang said.
GSAT content ensures that the first semester of a student’s final year is spent reviewing material from previous years, while the application process keeps them from focusing on coursework during the second, he said.
Teachers have trouble designing second-semester coursework because of different student objectives, National Senior High School Teachers’ Union director-general Huang Yao-nan (黃耀南) said.
“Some students are preparing their application materials, while others want to take the Assigned Subject Test and we end up getting caught in the middle,” he said.
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