Too much assessment is forcing schools to drill Primary Six students, placing them under study pressure and limiting their opportunities for extracurricular activities, according to a survey of teachers and parents released yesterday. The Hong Kong Primary Education Research Association, which conducted the study, is using the findings to argue for two important city-wide exams to be merged or rescheduled. 'We believe it is unreasonable to expect Primary Six students to sit two very different exams within a month of each other,' said Sun Lit-yau, chairman of the association, referring to the Territory-Wide System Assessment (TSA) and the Pre-Secondary One Hong Kong Attainment Test (HKAT). 'Excessive testing has a corrupting influence on the whole education system. We are trying to revise the education system to make it more aimed at whole-person education, but that can't be done with all this assessment.' Mr Sun said students were under a lot of pressure from parents to achieve and those who did not perform well often felt demoralised and lost interest in learning. The HKAT was sat yesterday morning by Primary Six students across the city. The results are used by their secondary schools to gauge their ability in Chinese, English and maths when they enter Form One. The TSA is held in mid-June for students in Primary Three, Primary Six and Form Three. The test examines the students' level of English, Chinese and maths, and is used to give schools internal feedback on the effectiveness of their teaching. Students' results do not directly affect their own schooling. However, the results of a school's Primary Six TSA are now used to modify the academic ranking of the subsequent year's graduates when applying for secondary school places. The association polled parents and teachers at 152 randomly selected primary schools, and received 1,887 responses at 59 schools. Of the respondents, 68.8 per cent thought the two public exams were excessive, 63.8 per cent felt they resulted in the use of rote learning to drill students, 60 per cent believed students' revision workload was putting them under study pressure and just under half felt it reduced extracurricular activities. Wu Siu-wai, a lecturer at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and secretary of the association, said: 'Our research clearly shows that the preferable solution would be to merge these two exams for Primary Six students.' Call for reform The proportion of 1,877 teachers and parents surveyed who believed the TSA and HKAT exams should be merged into a single test was: 75.6%