Letters | Business and accounting paper in Hong Kong’s DSE exam should not be dumbed down
- Updates to the Business, Accounting and Financial Studies subject, which already covers too much ground to prepare students adequately for tertiary education, have worsened the problem
The government knows that poor education can lead to the collapse of a country, and claims it wants to improve our education system. However, when it comes to the actual work of improvement, government officials, especially those at the Education Bureau, always do the opposite.
Besides refining the curriculum, the authorities have also adjusted the marks allocation for the subject’s two papers, from 60:40 to 75:25.
Reading the curriculum for accounting strand students, other volunteer tutors and I were shocked that items like accounting treatments for dissolution of partnership, calculation of cash and inventory loss from incomplete record have been deleted, while the size of the compulsory syllabus was not reduced by much.
The updated curriculum for the accounting elective section is overly trimmed and is of a lower level than international A-levels, the old Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination, and even the LCCI Level 2 test for accounting clerks.
Since the introduction of this subject as part of the new secondary school curriculum, both teachers and students have complained that the subject coverage is too wide. It needed to be split into two independent subjects, on accounting and business management.