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.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
RSS