The Polytechnic University is to scrap an English test for undergraduates which took five years to develop at a cost of $8 million.
The move, which comes into force today, follows the University Grants Committee's (UGC) announcement at the end of July that it will adopt the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) as the exit test for all undergraduates from next year.
Polytechnic University's president Professor Poon Chung-kwong criticised education officials for depriving Hong Kong of an opportunity to develop a test which catered for the strengths and weaknesses of local students.
'Our own test can hardly be sustained as it's foreseeable that even our students will opt for sitting the IELTS with [the] government subsidy,' he said.
The government is to subsidise final-year undergraduates who volunteer to sit the international test, jointly administered by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate and the British Council.
Polytechnic University developed its Graduating Students' Language Proficiency Assessment between 1994 and 1999 with a one-off UGC grant. A total of $8 million was invested in developing the test, which has been used by the university since 2000.