Civic groups yesterday said that the university entrance system should be reconsidered, and called on the Ministry of Education to require universities to adopt unified standards for admission interviews and shoulder the responsibility for explaining the admission process.
Taipei High School Parents Association vice president Ma Yu-ling (馬玉玲) said that department interviews, which comprise a crucial rung of the admissions process, are arbitrary and opaque.
As universities are not required to establish centralized admissions committees to enforce unitary admission standards, professors have discretion over how interviews are conducted, which makes it difficult for students to prepare for them, she said.
Professors’ broad discretion also leads to inappropriate and random interview topics, as well as providing space for the personal relationships of professors to influence which students they admit, she added.
She added that universities’ expensive interview fees place a burden on disadvantaged students, a problem exacerbated by the transportation costs of traveling to schools across the nation for interviews.
Ma said universities should be required to establish centralized admission committees to oversee the departmental interview process and to draft clear admission standards.
The current university admissions system is split into three stages, including recommendation by students’ schools, an individual application process involving interviews and a final round based on test scores.
While the vast majority of students were formerly admitted based exclusively on test scores, the proportion of students admitted in the final round has been gradually reduced to about half that of students admitted in previous rounds.
Alliance on Obligatory Education convener Wang Li-sheng (王立昇) said that the complicated nature of the admissions process served to further disadvantage students from poor backgrounds because they are not able to get the counseling and support needed to navigate the complicated process. He cited studies of students admitted to National Taiwan University, which showed a disproportionate number of disadvantaged students being admitted based on test scores during the final round.
As the three-stage admission process is dragged out over a six-month period, it also prevents students from focusing on their coursework during their final year of high school, forcing many students to take extensive remedial coursework during their first year of college, he said.
Wang called for the proportion of students admitted in the final round to be raised without specifying the ideal proportion.
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