Technical college students yesterday denounced Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Secretary-General Cheng Cheng-lung (
In a press conference, the students demanded an apology from Cheng and said his logic and methods were unsound.
Last week, Cheng said that he tested 2,300 students in the top three private technical colleges using English and math questions from junior high school texts and review booklets.
According to Cheng, only 2.1 percent of the students passed the English portion and just 7.6 percent passed the math.
Extrapolating from those figures, Cheng said that if all technical college students took the exam, 650,000 out of 680,000 would fail.
Representatives from the Students Rights Association said that conclusion was faulty, and that it is unfair to judge all technical college students from only a small sample of 2,300.
Wang Hao-chung (
Wang said that such an assumption and Cheng's earlier remarks about the students wasting resources will only deepen society's bias against technical schools.
"The reason we go to vocational high schools followed by technical colleges is that we didn't get good grades in junior high school in the first place," Wang said. "Finally we have a chance to learn special skills that we are good at, but Cheng's remarks really have a negative impact on our self-confidence."
Lu Po-chun (
"My child deserves a good education too, even though his grades weren't good enough to get into a normal high school," Lu said. "Would you want your children to leave school and start working at the age of 15 or 16 just because he got bad grades in junior high?"
While Cheng originally said that he gave math and English tests to students at three top private technical colleges.
According to a document released at the press conference, the test was actually conducted at the extension education center of Ching Yun Technical University, a middle-range technical college.
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