Exams, boring teachers are pupils' big concerns
Nearly a third of secondary school students find exam pressure their biggest headache, while a quarter name boring teachers, a survey has found.
The survey of 2,800 students by Catholic charity Caritas Hong Kong also found that 40 per cent were convinced that academic results from open exams and internal testing should remain as the most important set of criteria for universities in selecting students. 'Such contradictions show that many students, while finding exams too hard to handle, still consider exams as the only viable method at present that guarantees a certain degree of fairness and equality in determining their chances of a university place,' said survey co-organiser Cheung Chun-wai.
A separate survey, by Lingnan University, also found that 45 per cent believed that unauthorised downloading of music files was not unethical while 32 per cent said it would be unethical unless the original CDs were too expensive. More than half said they spent up to $2,000 a month buying pirated copies.
The survey of about 1,000 secondary school students, commissioned by RTHK, found about 60 per cent had downloaded music files even though they knew it might violate copyright laws. It found that more than 90 per cent of secondary school students used computers, with 85 per cent having their own computers at home.
Two-thirds of young users used computers to surf the Internet, and nearly half used them for homework and computer games.
Two senior Guangzhou teachers have been invited by pro-Beijing secondary schools to make a six-month inspection tour of Hong Kong schools in the first exchange of its kind.
Du Jian, senior mathematics teacher at Zhixin Middle School, and Xu Ziqiang, a special grade Chinese-language teacher at Fourth Middle School, have been invited under a pilot scheme sponsored by the pro-Beijing Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers. If successful, more tours could take place.
Special grade teachers are graded not only by experience but on their students' performance. There are usually only 200 such teachers in each province.
