Letters | Coronavirus in Hong Kong: exam obsession to blame for anxiety over DSE delays
- Education reforms that tried to introduce measures of student performance other than a public exam have clearly failed to reduce the city’s reliance on exam results
- Students’ health should come first in the Education Bureau’s consideration of whether to cancel the DSE exam
This shows that Hong Kong has yet to move away from its exam-oriented culture, despite years of education reform. Since the early 2000s, the government has introduced sweeping changes to the curriculum for senior secondary education, and school-based assessments were gradually incorporated in DSE subjects.
However, as autonomous as the practice of school-based assessments may seem, the group results are in fact adjusted based on public exam scores. Plus, after a review of the reform in 2015, the Education Bureau decided to trim school-based assessments. This reinforcement of the importance of DSE written exams was hardly a paradigm shift.
In fact, over the years, local tertiary institutions have not changed much in terms of admission mechanisms. Public exam performance remains the major determinant of applicants’ success in getting admitted to post-secondary programmes.
Unlike the UK system, where predicted grades and admission interviews are of paramount importance, the Hong Kong system does not place a high level of trust in schools’ evaluation of academic attainment.
While school reference reports submitted to the Joint University Programmes Admissions System are used for selecting students for interviews, universities tend to not make conditional offers to applicants on the basis of their percentile rankings in individual subjects, nor give a heavy weighting to interview performance in their selection guideline.