On the marking method on the Use of English, Section E paper (UEE) of the HKALE, 'Drawing the lines for language success' (Education Post, May 12), the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority released a press statement on April 27 to address this issue with the following message: One of the aims of the UEE paper, Practical Skills for Work and Study, is to determine whether candidates can apply their language skills by writing precisely in situations related to work and study.
For task one in the 2007 paper, candidates were asked to write a persuasive letter to a company within a specified limit of 500 words. The task is designed to assess the ability of candidates to process information, to compare and contrast information and to use this information in dealing with a variety of communication tasks and problems. To present ideas effectively within the word limit is an integral part of the assessment design of the task.
The panel of examiners found that a minority of candidates wrote well beyond the 500-word limit for this task, although the instructions clearly state that the candidate should '...write a letter of no more than 500 words'.
There are two components in the marking scheme for this task, content and presentation. In this year's marking scheme, content marks will not be awarded for that part of a candidate's response that exceeds the 500-word limit. This means that candidates who have not followed the instructions and have exceeded the set word limit will not gain an advantage in terms of scoring content points.
By enforcing the word limit, markers are able to discriminate more accurately between more and less able candidates.