YOUR correspondent, Leona Ip, (South China Morning Post, July 20) wrote to challenge the usefulness of the recently introduced Advanced Supplementary Level subjects (AS-levels) which are due to be examined for the first time in the 1994 A-level Examinations.
Her principal argument seems to be that the new AS-levels make such heavy demands on students that they may ''lead to poor academic performance, and this stress may result in adverse psychological effect.'' While there are obviously problems for both teachers and students when they belong to a group pioneering such major changes, the view of most educationalists in Hongkong is that these reforms to the sixth-form curriculum are long overdue.
Hongkong for a long time has had a narrow and excessively specialised sixth-form curriculum.
Typically, the course patterns have involved concentrating on three A-level subjects in the same discipline together with Use of English.
Moreover Chinese Language, the mother tongue of virtually all the candidates, has been ignored by 70 per cent of A-level candidates. The introduction of AS-level subjects, recommended in Education Commission Report No 2, was an attempt to broaden the curriculum by having the majority of students drop at least one A-level subject in favour of two AS-levels. (An AS-level is meant to be taught in half the number of periods as an A-level but to make the same demands in terms of intellectual rigour).
The second important change was to introduce Chinese Language and Culture as a core subject.